Black and grey realistic raven with pink roses tattooed across a woman's upper back and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Raven and roses across a back

Realism · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large raven with outstretched wings spans the upper back, drawn with fine feather detail and soft grey shading. Pink and red roses sit on the shoulder, along the upper back and at the lower left of the frame. The bird is rendered in black and grey while the roses carry the colour, against a dark background and black top straps.

Realism Botanical Back Shoulder Raven Bird Wing Rose Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, before the wasps have the last of the plums. Aye, you can hear it from here, that's the old bird in Dunmere Wood, and no, it isn't a rook, whatever Fenn's boy tells you. It's a raven, black as a coal scuttle, and when it opens its wings it shades half the orchard. It came down the valley the summer the Hallows place went to ruin, carrying roses in its beak.

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Nobody grew roses in that valley. The walled garden had gone to brambles after Mrs Ashcombe died, and her husband sat by the gate with a shotgun across his knees and would not let a soul past. The bird did not ask. It came each evening when the bells in Stanmore struck six, dropped one bloom on the gatepost, then rose over the apple rows with the wings spread wide. Every rose was a different shade: pale as skimmed milk, then red as a split lip, then a pink that seemed to glow on its own.

Ambrose Hale, who was a stubborn man and a worse gardener, followed it one evening with a lantern. He found a gap in the wall and, under the old quince, a thin hand pushing a cutting into the earth. It was Mrs Ashcombe. She had not died at all, only grown tired of being looked at through windows, and for a year she had sent her roses out on the bird so the valley would remember the garden was still there.

Ambrose carried the lantern home and left his own gate open. The next evening there were two ravens over the orchard, and one of them had a rose in its beak for him.