Traditional style tattoo of a black raven perched on a grey skull, with red flowers and green leaves, on a lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Raven on a skull with red flowers on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A black raven perches on a shaded grey skull, with two red flowers and green leaves filling the space around its wings and the skull. The bold black outlines are paired with grey shading and white highlights on the feathers and skull, giving a solid, graphic finish. Colour is limited to the red blooms and green foliage against the monochrome bird and skull, and the design runs vertically up the leg.

Traditional Calf Raven Crow Skull Flower Leaves Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The toll-keeper at Coldwater Bridge had grown old counting carts, and the raven on his gatepost had grown old counting them with him. Nobody in the valley could say where it came from. It arrived with the spring floods and left with the first hard frost, and in between it watched the road with one eye and the river with the other.

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One grey morning a stranger came up from the south leading a mule with a bundle lashed across its back. He wore a coat too heavy for the weather and said he had nothing to declare. The toll-keeper named his price: one copper penny for the bridge, and a second for the bones, which was the old custom for travellers carrying someone home. The stranger laughed and paid the first coin only. The raven hopped down to the fence rail and tilted its head at the bundle.

The toll-keeper lifted the sacking. Inside was a skull wrapped in a good linen shirt, clean and yellowed with age. "My brother's," the stranger said. "He always wanted to see the far side of the water." The raven flew down and settled on the skull, its claws fitting neatly into the hollow of the crown as though it had been expecting the visit. The toll-keeper understood then that the bird had not been keeping the count for him. It had been keeping it for the dead.

He let them both across for the one penny and said nothing about the second. By morning the raven was back on the gatepost, the copper was gone from the box, and in its place lay a single red bloom, still wet from the far bank.