Black and grey tattoo of a raven with thistle stems and a Latin banner across a man's chest, with a smaller bird on the shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Raven and thistles across chest and shoulder

Realism · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A large raven sits on the upper chest, with a second bird on the shoulder and thistle stems spreading across the chest beneath it. A banner reads VULNERANT OMNES ULTIMA NECAT, and a row of Roman numerals runs along the lower chest. The work is mainly black and grey with sketchy, loose linework and soft shading, with a thin red line and a grey-green band crossing the upper chest.

Realism Botanical Chest Shoulder Raven Bird Thistle Banner Latin text Roman numeral Brush stroke

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost had got into the water trough again, so I broke it with the heel of my boot before the ewes came down from the top field. Dad's sundial stood in the yard where the wind could reach it, its bronze gone green at the edges. Mum still said it kept better time than the kitchen clock, which had been wrong since August.

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Grandad had cut the motto into the plate himself the winter before he died: VULNERANT OMNES, ULTIMA NECAT. All wound, the last one kills. He used to tap it with his knuckle when he wanted to make a point about the weather or the price of feed. I never asked him what he meant. I assumed it was about the thistles, which he hated more than foxes and which came up thick along the wall every summer however often we hacked them down.

That morning a raven sat on the gatepost and watched me. It was the same one that had been about since the funeral, big and unbothered, its beak the colour of wet slate. I tossed it the crust from my sandwich. It took the crust, then went straight to the dead thistle heads by the wall and worked out the seed one by one, as if it were counting them.

I stood by the sundial with the wind in my face and read the numerals with my finger, slowly, to see where the shadow fell. It was barely twenty past eight and the sun was still behind the hedge. Grandad would have said there was time yet. I left the last of the bread on the post for the raven and went in to light the range.