Black and grey realism drawing of a raven perched on a skull, with a scroll banner reading EXPENDABLE beneath it.

Raven perched on skull with banner

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a raven perched on top of a human skull, with a ribbon banner across the bottom bearing the word EXPENDABLE. The raven and skull are rendered with soft graduated shading and fine feather and bone detail. The design is in greyscale on a plain off-white background, with the banner curling out at the lower left and right.

Realism Raven Skull Banner Scroll Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada Pryce counted the frost-blackened dahlias before the light had properly reached the walls, one stem at a time with a cold thumb, the way her father had taught her. Sexton walked the brick coping above her, tapping each loose crumb of mortar as if he were doing the census himself. He had come to Thornmere the winter the old glasshouse cracked, and he had decided, with the mild authority of a bird who had survived three gamekeepers, that the walled garden belonged to him.

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The list was pinned in the potting shed under the seed calendar. Mr Gillow, the steward, had written it on good cream paper: eleven men to be let go once the drainage trench was dug, their names in a neat column, and beside each one the word EXPENDABLE, lettered with a flourish he plainly admired. Ada had read it twice, then gone out behind the rhubarb forcing pots and stood there a long while, which nobody saw but the raven.

She fetched the skull from the shelf where it had sat for forty years, holding the door open against the draught. It had been dug up with the old well and used ever since as a doorstop. She set it on the bench beside the list. Sexton hopped down from the coping, settled on the crown of it, and regarded her with one bright eye, as though the matter were already decided. Ada found Gillow's name at the head of the column, then her own at the foot, and wrote a line under each in her plain hand.

At noon the wind caught the folded paper and carried it over the wall, and the raven went after it, black against the sky. Somewhere on the Ashby road a steward found his own word staring up at him from the verge, the ink run and the lettering gone soft as pencil in the rain.