Neo-traditional tattoo of a black raven in front of an orange sunburst, with a red rose and an eye inside a triangle on a forearm, shown in three views.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Raven, rose and eye on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A large black raven perches on the left of the design, in front of an orange sunburst with ornate tips, and a red rose with green leaves sits to the right. Below the rose, an eye with a patterned brow is set inside a gold-outlined triangle. The raven uses soft grey shading and bold black outlines, while the rose, sunburst and eye are filled with bright red, orange, green and teal, and the image is shown as a three-panel view of the same forearm.

Neo-trad Forearm Raven Bird Rose Eye Sunburst Triangle Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The raven came down off the chapel roof the morning they took the church clock apart, and it sat on the scaffold rail as if it had been hired to watch the men work. Nobody in Ashby Fold liked birds about the square. Mr Pargeter swore at it with his mouth full of nails. I didn't mind it. I was nineteen, the only one in the parish who could read the old maker's marks, and a raven seemed fair company for a job like that.

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The clock had stopped in 1939 at twenty past four and nobody had wound it since. Mrs Doyle at the post office claimed it was waiting for her husband. The bird slipped in behind the face and came back with a brass cog in its beak every time, dropping it at my boots like a cat with a mouse. I started keeping them in a tin on the windowsill of the lodging house, the way a boy keeps conkers, and by the end of the month I had eleven.

On the last Saturday of June the rain held off long enough for the sun to rise over the ridge in one long orange fan, and the raven took its perch on the weathervane and looked straight down the lane at the Doyles' gate. I followed its gaze. A man in a grey mac was walking up slowly with a suitcase, and I knew from the way the bird ruffled its feathers that it knew him too. Mrs Doyle came out in her apron. She put a hand on the gatepost and didn't go in.

I wound the clock that evening with the eleven cogs, and every one of them fitted. It struck five, late and a bit wrong, and the raven flew off west without a backward look. Mrs Doyle stood in the square until the last stroke had gone.