Black and grey raven tattoo with a red brushstroke and thistles across the chest, with a flying bird on the shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Raven and thistles across chest

Chest · Mixed · Photo

A large sketch-style tattoo covers the upper chest, centred on a black raven perched on an ornamental frame, with a second raven flying on the shoulder. Thistle stems with seed heads run across the chest beneath a Latin inscription, and a line of Roman numerals sits lower down. Grey and teal-grey washes and a thin red stroke add colour to an otherwise black ink composition.

Chest Shoulder Raven Crow Bird Thistle Latin text Roman numeral Brushstroke

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bell in Corvane Tower has not sounded since the old queen was carried down the hill, and on the first hard frost of November the task falls to you. You climb the spiral stair with a sack of thistle seed under your arm, counting the Roman numerals cut into each step, because Oswin the clerk swore the stair holds the kingdom's debts and you must never miss one. At the top the ravens are waiting. One sits hunched on the ornamental iron frame around the clock face, its wings the colour of wet slate. The other drops from the rafters and lands on your shoulder as if it had been expecting you for years.

Keep reading

The brass plate above the door reads VULNERANT OMNES, ULTIMA NECAT, and Oswin had translated it for you with a dry little smile. All wound, the last one kills. You scatter the seed along the sill and the birds peck at it while you work the frost from the clapper. Beneath the silk wrapping you find not a bell-rope but a ledger, bound in grey cloth, its pages filled with tally marks that run down the margins in tidy rows. Every mark is a seed the ravens have taken, one for every hour the kingdom has lived past its due.

You understand then that the bell was never meant to toll the dead. It was meant to toll the debt, and the ravens have been keeping the accounts in their own patient way. You take the ledger down the stair, past every cut numeral, and you do not count them. In the square below, the frost is already greying the cobbles. The raven on the frame lifts its head and watches you go, and the thistles along the tower wall open their purple heads into the first pale light, as if they had only been waiting for someone to pay.