Four views of a black and grey realism full sleeve tattoo on an arm, showing a raven, a realistic eye, bare branches and the words Go with the flow.

Raven, eye and tree full sleeve

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows four angles of a full sleeve tattoo on an arm, with a large realistic raven head and a detailed eye above a dripping section. Bare branches, small birds and a silhouetted tree fade into the lower part of the arm, and the wording Go with the flow runs down the forearm in a bold typeface. The shading is smooth and tonal, with soft greys against the dark background and no coloured ink.

Realism Upper arm Forearm Raven Crow Eye Tree Branches Bird Lettering Sleeve Drip

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

Nobody in Tallow Bottom ever saw the raven come down, which was how Mrs Pryce knew it was always there. It sat on the headgear of Number Four shaft through every shift, beak tipped towards the lamp room, and the men called it the timekeeper because it lifted off only when the cage came up full.

Keep reading

The new deputy, Evan Lloyd, a lad from the coast with clean hands, laughed at it and threw a lump of slack. The bird did not stir. That same night the lower roadways flooded, the pumps seized, and the cage stopped at the four hundred foot mark with two men still on the landing. Someone had to go down the drift. Mrs Pryce, who had buried two husbands from that pit, walked up to the gate with a tin flask and told him to stop fighting the water.

He went anyway, with a rope round his chest and a stub of candle. The flood ran black along the old haulage road, carrying broken ash branches from the spoil heap and a scatter of small birds that rode the current like driftwood. Evan wanted to prop the roof with timber. The water wanted the timber too. So he cut the rope loose from the rail, lay back on the surface where the stream was carrying him, and let it take him down the incline, steering with his heels. It delivered him to the sump, and there, under the drip of the wall, he found the stranded men holding onto a pump pipe with their eyes shut.

He came up at dawn, grey to the eyebrows, and the headgear was empty. Mrs Pryce was waiting at the top of the bank. "You let it carry you, did you?" she said. He told her he had. She nodded at the sky, where a black shape was circling back over the wheel, and turned for home to put the kettle on.