Black and grey illustration of a raven with a small red eye, its feathers dripping ink above an ink bottle labelled INK with its lid beside it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Raven dripping ink over an ink bottle

Black and grey · Flash

A stylised raven with outstretched wings and a small red eye is shown in profile against a plain white background. Its feathers drip with ink and loose feathers fall beside a glass bottle labelled INK, with its cap and a pool of spilt ink at the base. The linework is bold and the shading uses solid blacks and soft greys, with the composition centred on the bird and bottle.

Raven Crow Ink drip Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fair had pitched on the water meadow outside Market Dunmere, and the ground was still soft from the week's rain when you came down the steps of the painting wagon with the lamp in one hand and the bottle in the other. Jet was awake on the perch above the ticket hatch, as he always was, and ink ran off his wing tips in slow black beads that spotted the boards like dropped buttons.

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You had lettered every banner for Vane's Travelling Marvels since you were fourteen, and the bottle on your bench had never once run dry. Mrs Vane said it was the raven's doing. You said it was a good cork. She laughed, and the laugh turned into a cough, and the cough had been getting worse since Lammas. Jet watched you mix the gold size for the new canvas with his head on one side, the way a clerk checks a sum.

On the last night of the season you found the canvas had been written on. Beneath your careful FORTUNES in red and gold ran a line of black, neat as copperplate, that you did not remember painting: MRS VANE WILL NOT SEE THE SPRING. Under it the space was empty, waiting for a name. Jet sat on the wagon step, very still, the red of his eye bright in the lamplight.

You stood there a long time. Then you dipped the brush, wrote your own name in the empty space with the last of the ink, and felt the bottle go cold and light in your hand. Morning came grey over the meadow. The caravans had gone, the ground was churned to mud, and beside the wagon step lay one long black feather with the cork set neatly back in the mouth of an empty bottle.