Traditional style tattoo of a black raven with red ribbons and a banner reading CONSIDER THE RAVEN, on the upper arm.

Raven with Consider the Raven banner

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A black raven with bold outlines and solid black shading sits across a curled banner that reads CONSIDER THE RAVEN. Red ribbons loop above and to the right of the bird, with red accents on the beak and feathers. The design fills most of the frame, with part of another tattoo visible along the bottom edge.

Traditional Upper arm Raven Bird Banner Ribbon Scroll Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Snow had been falling on the Carrow Inn since Tuesday, and by Thursday the road to Hexby had vanished under a white wall nobody would drive. Maud Pellow counted the cellar casks twice a day because counting gave her hands something to do. Her father had gone down the valley for the doctor and not come back. The only guests left were four stranded drovers and a tinsmith who paid for his supper in brass buttons.

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The raven arrived on Thursday evening, tapping at the shutter with a beak like a folded blade. It was black as the bread oven, with a red ribbon knotted to one leg. When Maud untied it, the ribbon unrolled into a small scroll in her father's cramped hand: Consider the raven. The drovers laughed and said it was a parson's joke. The tinsmith turned his buttons over in his palm and said nothing at all.

Maud did consider it, mostly because the ledger was the only thing in the house she had not yet read. Every debt owed to the inn and every debt the inn was owed sat in its pages, along with the names of those who had paid in flour during the lean winter. On the last page her father had drawn a bird with its wings spread, and beneath it he had written: Their barn is not empty, though the bins say otherwise. She went out with a lantern and found the flour sacks full again, and a trail of small prints in the snow leading to the woodpile.

By dawn the wind had dropped. The raven sat on the gatepost, red ribbons streaming from its wing tips like loose bunting, and watched her carry out a heel of bread. She set it on the step, went back inside, and left the ledger open at that page for her father to find, should the road ever clear.