Realistic coloured raven perched on a bare branch, set against a soft pink and green background, tattooed across a person's upper back.

Raven perched on a branch across the upper back

Realism · Back · Mixed · Photo

A realistic raven sits on a gnarled, bare tree branch, with its head turned to the right and one eye rendered in pale blue. The feathers are shaded with fine, soft gradations in green, grey, orange and pink, and the bark is dark with warm orange highlights. The bird is set against a loose, watercolour-like wash of pink, yellow and green with small speckles, which frames it on the shoulder blade area.

Realism Back Raven Crow Bird Branch Tree Bark

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The raven came down to the harbour wall the morning after the boats failed to return, and it sat on the iron bollard with its head turned sideways, the way a man listens for a bell. Maud Tully, who mended nets at the end of Cobb Lane, threw it a crust and told it to be off. It did not go. It hopped along the slick stones to where the gutting trough ran red, and it looked at her with one eye the colour of a winter sky over open water.

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Folk in Skerrick said a raven that sat on the wall before a loss was keeping count, and nobody liked that. Maud's husband Ned had gone out on the Gannet with three others the Thursday before, and the sea had brought back only the Gannet's oars. She had not wept yet. She had been too busy with the mending. But the bird watched her hang the washing and watched her walk down to the water each dusk, and on the ninth evening it flew up into the old elder above the chapel, where the branches were grey and bare, and called once, a sound like a rusted hinge.

Maud followed it. Under the elder, half buried in the roots, lay a tin lantern with its glass unbroken and a scrap of oilcloth knotted round the handle. Tucked inside was a note in Ned's square hand: Gone past the Stacks to fetch the drowned bell. Light the lamp if I'm late. She had never known him to write anything but tallies. The lantern was warm to the touch. She carried it down, lit it, and set it on the wall, and the raven settled on the post beside it, its feathers catching the glow in streaks of green and rose.

Near midnight a light answered from beyond the Stacks, slow and steady, and a bell rang faintly somewhere under the water. Maud did not weep until the boat came in at first light with three men and a bell wrapped in sacking. By then the raven had gone, leaving a single grey feather on the bollard, pale at its tip as a fleck of sky.