Small solid black blackwork raven silhouette perched on the side of a finger, shown in black and white.

Raven silhouette on a finger

Blackwork · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A small, solid black silhouette of a raven or crow in profile sits on the side of a finger. The bird has no interior detail, so its form is defined only by its outline, with a slightly rough edge. The photograph is black and white, with the finger, a painted white nail and a dark textured surface filling the frame.

Blackwork Hand Raven Crow Bird Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, the kettle's only half cold and this story is older than the kettle. You want to hear about the bird. Everybody wants the bird. Out past the Lantern Station, back when the forward holds still had light in them, there was a clerk called Hettie Brannoch who kept the ledger for the salvage ship Mab's Patience, and she had a raven that sat on the shelf above her desk.

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It wasn't a living raven, mind. Hettie had cut it from the black casing of a dead navigation slate, a plain flat thing with no eye and no feathers, just the outline of a bird in profile, its beak pointed at the port glass as if it had seen something out there and was too polite to mention it. The crew called it Ferris, after a man who had once owed everyone money. Every night at the change of watch, Hettie would tap the shelf twice and say, "Mind the heading, Ferris," and then she'd go back to her sums.

Then the third winter came, and the main drive coughed itself to silence somewhere under the spine of the ship. The lamps went amber, then grey, then nothing. The crew wanted to burn the old ledgers for warmth, and Captain Oduya was ready to let them, until Hettie stood in the dark with her back to the shelf and said the one thing nobody could argue with: a bird's outline is the last thing a body can still read when every light has gone. So they followed the black shape by the glow of the hull lichen, step by step, along the cold corridors, until a draught came up from somewhere ahead that smelled of rain.

Did the bird fly? Don't be daft. A bit of lacquer doesn't fly. But when we came out through the breach into the harbour at Sallow Reach, the shelf was bare, and Hettie's last line in the ledger read only: heading kept. Beside it she'd drawn a small black bird, no feathers, no eye, just the edge of a thing that had once been going somewhere, and it's still in there, on page one, if you care to look.