Black and grey realism raven with thistle stems and a Latin scroll tattooed across a man's chest and shoulder, with a small red line accent.

Raven and thistles across chest and shoulder

Realism · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A large raven perches on the upper chest with a smaller bird in flight above the shoulder, alongside thistle stems, a flourished scroll banner reading VOLUCRANT OMNES ULTIMA NEGAT, and a row of small lettering below. The birds and plant are rendered in shaded black and grey with fine detail, while abstract grey bands and a thin red stroke run across the upper body. The composition spans the shoulder and chest, with the subject's face and neck cropped out of frame.

Realism Botanical Shoulder Chest Raven Crow Bird Thistle Flower Stem Scroll Banner Latin text Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The raven came down onto the marquee pole just as Euan was reading his vows off the back of a bus ticket, because the card had blown into the loch. Every one of us turned to look at it. It sat there with its shoulders hunched like a bailiff, eyeing the bride's bouquet, which Morag had insisted on making entirely of thistles because she said she wanted something that stung a little if you grabbed it.

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My grandfather Dougie leaned across the table and muttered that ravens never come to weddings for the cake. There's an old saying in our glen that the birds all fly off in the end, but the last one stays to see what you do with your life. He said the words cut into the lintel of the kirk meant much the same, though nobody had ever agreed on the translation. I told him that was the most Dougie thing anyone had ever said at a wedding.

When Morag set the bouquet on the trestle to hug her cousin, the bird hopped down, took a purple thistle head in its beak, and sat looking straight at me as though I owed it money. Then it lifted off over the water with the last red streak of sky behind it, and I waited for it to drop the flower. It never did.

By the time the ceilidh started, the bird was back on the kirkyard wall with the thistle still clamped in its beak, watching us dance as if it had paid for a seat.