Colour neo-trad tattoo of a black raven with red poppies, green leaves and white scrollwork on the outer thigh.

Raven and red poppies on a thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A black raven faces left at the centre of the design, with red poppy-like flowers, green leaves and white scrolling ornament around it. The raven is rendered in solid black with detailed feather shading and bold dark outlines. Bright red and green colour contrasts strongly with the black and the pale skin, and the tattoo wraps across the outer thigh below dark underwear.

Neo-trad Botanical Thigh Raven Crow Bird Poppy Flower Leaves Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down on that step, mind the pigeon mess, and I'll tell you about the raven who lived on the fourteenth floor of Carrow House. Nobody owned him. He came in on the wind off the reservoir, same as the damp and the shouting, and he never once paid rent.

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Mrs Dacre kept poppies in old paint tins along her balcony rail, because the council wouldn't let anyone plant so much as a daisy in the square. Red ones, big as saucers, that bled colour all over the grey concrete. The raven took a fancy to them. Every morning he'd sit on the rail among the tins, black as a bin bag, turning his head to look at her with one bright eye. She'd give him the crusts from her toast, and he'd give her back bottle tops and bits of foil, which she pressed flat and kept in a biscuit tin like treasure.

Then the letter came. Demolition, the paper said, sixteen weeks, and the lift had been broken since March, so the old dear had to climb. The man from the housing office stood on her landing with his clipboard and told her the poppies would have to go. She said nothing. The raven came down off the rail, landed on that clipboard, and took the pen clean out of the man's hand.

They never did knock the tower down, not in the end. The paperwork went somewhere and got lost. Mrs Dacre died in her chair one October with the window open, and the poppies bloomed the week after, just for the funeral. If you stand on the landing at dusk, you'll hear him on the rail, saying her name in the voice she taught him, and nobody's ever managed to make him stop.