Realistic colour tattoo of a raven perched in front of a pale moon and bare branches, with red roses, covering an upper arm and shoulder.

Raven, moon and red roses on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A large tattoo covers the upper arm and shoulder, showing a black raven in profile with a pale full moon and leafless branches behind it. Red roses sit across the lower half, with soft shading that gives the feathers and petals a three-dimensional look. The background is mostly grey and black, so the red roses stand out as the main colour accent against the muted scene.

Realism Upper arm Shoulder Raven Crow Moon Tree Branches Rose

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The raven arrived at Gullhaven the week the lamp went dark, and it sat on the rail of the gallery as if it had been posted there. Nobody on the rock could say where it had flown from. Ada, who kept the light after her husband drowned, fed it scraps of salt cod and named it Tallow, because it was the colour of lamp smoke and because she had no other name to give it.

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Ships came in the dark months and the fog took them. When the moon hung full over the ness and the bare thorn trees on the slope rattled like dry bones, Tallow would lift off and go inland, and come back before dawn with something in its beak. One night it brought a rose hip, red as a coal, and dropped it into her palm without a sound.

She understood the gift the next morning, when the tide threw a fishing coble onto the shingle. In the bow lay a boy of perhaps twelve, alive, clutching a cutting of red rose wrapped in wet sacking. His mother had grown the bush on the mainland and sent him out to find the keeper's wife, who had once given her a slip of the same plant when the sea took her first man. Ada had forgotten the kindness. Tallow had not.

That spring she set the cutting at the foot of the tower, where the salt spray could reach it, and the raven sat on the lamp housing and watched the roses open one deep red bloom after another, while the moon went round above the empty headland.