Black and grey raven with spread wings and an open beak on an upper arm, with pine branches, a pinecone and a rose behind it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Raven and pine branches on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large raven with spread wings and an open beak sits across the upper arm and shoulder, shown from two angles in a side-by-side photo. The feathers are built up with dense black shading and fine grey highlights, and the background has pine branches, a pinecone, a rose and light stippling. The tattoo is entirely black and grey, and the framing is close, showing the full design across the arm.

Neo-trad Upper arm Shoulder Raven Bird Rose Feather Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The raven came down to the mill race the morning after the frost, when the pines above Harrow Dene had gone the colour of old pewter. My grandmother said ravens only came to a place when somebody there was about to lose a thing they had been carrying a long time. She said it while she shelled peas into a bowl, and she did not look up.

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The bird stood on the wet stone with its wings half open, like a coat hung to dry, and it opened its beak as if to shout at the water. Nobody in Dunmere had ever heard a raven make a sound like that, a bark with a hinge in it. Old Tobias Pell, who kept the ferry and trusted nothing with feathers, threw a pinecone at it. The bird caught the cone in its foot, turned it once, and dropped it at his boots.

That was the start of it. Tobias went home and found his wife had packed his pipe, his razor and the brass key to the boathouse into a sack by the door, the way she had been meaning to do for years. He stood there a long while. Then he picked up the sack, walked down to the river, and gave the raven the key. The bird took it without fuss and flew off east, over the dark firs, toward the place where the pines stop and the moor begins.

Tobias came back to the village that spring with a new wife and a different boat. He never told anyone what the key opened. Some say it was a door, some say it was only a lie he had been keeping, and my grandmother says it made no difference to the raven, which had come for the key and not the reasons.