Black raven with a crescent moon, peach poppies and sunflowers arranged around a grey skull, drawn as a botanical tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Raven perched on a skull with flowers

Botanical · Colour · Flash

A black raven stands on top of a grey skull, with its talons gripping a small strand of beads. Peach poppies, sunflowers and dark leaves frame the bird and skull, and a pale peach crescent moon sits behind the raven's head. The linework is fine with stippled shading on the petals and feathers, set against a plain white background.

Botanical Raven Crow Skull Crescent moon Poppy Sunflower Flower Leaves Bead

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The raven came down the pass at dusk, as it had every night since the snow shut the upper road, and settled on the skull nailed above your door as if it had been paid to. Your father found that skull on the Gap the winter before he died, and you never liked how the bird studied it, the way a clerk studies a figure he suspects. Tonight it held a string of white beads in its talons, the kind the carters' wives sew onto their hat bands.

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You knew whose they were before you saw the broken thread. Harl Denny had come over at noon with two mules and no drover, swearing he would be down the far side by moonrise. The moon was up now, a thin peach paring over Blackcombe, the same soft colour as the poppies your mother pressed between the pages of her hymnal. You took the lantern off its hook and walked out to the cairn where the road bends, calling his name into a wind that gave nothing back.

He lay face down in the drift beside the lead mule, one fist still closed on the bridle. There was nothing to do but kneel, turn him over and feel for the cold. The raven watched from the cairn, unhurried. When you looked up, it dropped the beads at your boots, one at a time, each one catching the lantern like a small moon.

You gathered them all, nineteen, and counted them twice against the tally in your father's hand, because the Gap always keeps its count. Then you carried them back up the path and hung them on the hook beside the skull, where the bird could see them. It came back at dusk the next night, as you knew it would, and you gave it the bread you had been saving for yourself.