Neo-trad style raven perched on an arrow with a red stippled Nevermore banner and a feather on a calf, black and grey with red blood splatter.

Raven with arrow and feather under Nevermore banner

Neo-trad · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A black raven with a yellow eye perches on an arrow shaft, with its beak open above a red and grey stippled banner that reads NEVERMORE. A dark feather and red splatter sit below the arrow tip. The bird is shaded in black and grey with smooth linework, while the banner uses dense dotwork and the splatter adds bold red accents.

Neo-trad Dotwork Calf Raven Crow Bird Arrow Feather Banner

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mairead had counted the stairs of the Skerry light so many times she could do it blind, one hundred and twelve iron treads spiralling up past the lens, and still the raven was waiting on the rail when she reached the gallery. It had waited every night since the storm took her father's boat. It never came closer than the iron rail, and it never spoke, though it opened its beak now and then as if a word had stuck in its throat.

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Her father had shot at it once, the week before he went out, and the arrow from his old longbow had gone clean through the gunwale of the dinghy. He said the bird had looked at him the way a magistrate looks at a man in the dock. Mairead had found the arrow lodged in the rocks below, its shaft slick with weed, and she had kept it, though she could not have said why.

Tonight she laid it on the rail beside the bird. The feather it had dropped sat on the gallery floor, grey-black and stiff with salt. Below, the sea flung itself at the rocks hard enough to make the glass hum. She wondered whether the bird wanted the arrow back, or wanted her to say the word it had been holding.

"Nevermore," she said, to see what would happen.

The raven looked at her with its gold eye, then out at the dark water, where the lamp's red beam swept its slow circle across the foam. It lifted, unhurried, and was gone. For the first time in a month the stairs were quiet when she went down, and she did not count them.