Black and grey realism tattoo of a raven perched on a bare branch that wraps down the lower leg towards the ankle.

Raven perched on a branch on the lower leg

Realism · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A large raven faces right, perched on a twisting bare branch that runs down the lower leg towards the ankle. The bird is rendered in smooth black and grey shading with detailed feather texture, while the branch uses bolder dark lines with small twigs spreading outwards. The plain skin background and soft even lighting keep the focus on the tattoo.

Realism Calf Raven Bird Branch Twig Tree

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

The oak by Hollin Lock had been dead since my grandfather's time, and the raven came to it the winter the flood took the bridge at Sallow Ford. It sat on the highest twig with its back to the water and watched the gates the way a clerk watches a queue. Nobody in the village liked it. Mrs Pargeter swore it could tell a drowning before the drowning happened, and she said so the way other women said the weather.

Keep reading

I was twelve and didn't believe in omens, only in lock keepers' wages, which were nothing. My father worked the gates from dawn until the light went, and he never once looked up at the bird. Then came the night in February when the Mary Ellen came through too fast with the river in her, and my father stepped onto the greasy beam to catch a line. The raven lifted off the branch and passed over him, low, and I have never since heard a bird make a sound so like a bell.

They found his cap in the sluice in March. The raven stayed. It sat in that bare oak all through spring, and whenever a barge came up to the gates I went out with the windlass and counted. Two hundred and eleven boats by midsummer. I wrote each one in pencil on the inside of the lock-house door, under my father's last tally, because somebody had to keep the book and nobody else would sit up with it.

On the last day of the season the bird stepped down the branch one twig at a time, took a crust from my palm, and flew off east towards the sea. I left the pencil on the sill and wrote my own name at the head of the gates. Under it I left a clean space, the way you do in a ledger, for whoever came next to fill in.