Black ink tattoo of a flying raven whose wing turns into bare tree branches, shaded in blackwork and realism style across the ribs.

Raven with a bare tree wing on the ribs

Blackwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A raven in flight faces left with its wings spread, and its upper wing dissolves into the bare branches of a leafless tree. The feathers are shaded in black and grey with fine highlights left as skin, and the branches have crisp, sharp edges. The tattoo runs diagonally across the side of the torso against a pale, textured wall.

Blackwork Realism Ribs Raven Crow Bird Tree Branches Wing Flight

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had sealed the pass for nine days when the raven came down the chimney and sat on the cold hearth, shaking soot from its wings as if it had paid for the room. Maud Tennant, who kept the Drover's Rest with her brother Alf, swept the ash toward the grate and said nothing. Alf stood in the doorway with the lamp and asked the bird what it wanted.

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The raven said it wanted bread, and a corner out of the wind, and in return it would tell them where the road was. Alf did not like that. Birds did not know roads. But Maud cut the heel from the loaf and set it down, and the raven ate it slowly while the wind worked at the shutters. When it was done it looked at the window and said the old ash in the yard had lost its leaves in autumn and had not forgotten how to reach. It said the ridge road ran under that ash, and if they followed the branches they would come down off the hill by morning.

They did not sleep much. Near dawn Maud went out with a shovel and found the ash bare and black against a sky the colour of pewter, its crown spread wide in the shape of a bird's wing, every twig pointing the same way. The raven was gone. Where it had sat on the hearth there was only a single grey feather and a dry smear of soot.

By the thaw the road was open, and the carters talked of a rider who had turned his horse off the ridge and gone north without stopping. Maud kept the feather in the tin with the tea. When the ash put out its first green in April, she noticed that the new leaves grew only on the far side, as if the tree were still trying to get up and leave.