Black and grey raven tattoo on the calf, with stippled dotwork shading on its head and wing and dark strands trailing downwards.

Raven with dissolving roots on a calf

Dotwork · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A raven's head and shoulder in profile, with its beak pointing left, are rendered in black ink and grey dotwork stippling. Below the body, the feathers break into long, thin black strands that look like roots or tendrils reaching down the leg. The photograph is taken at an angle on a grey pavement, with dark trousers and black sneakers visible around the calf, and a small patch of faint colour ink at the left edge.

Dotwork Blackwork Calf Raven Crow Bird Root Tendril Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dai Pryce had been told the raven was a bad sign the morning the cage stuck at four hundred feet, but the bird sat on the headgear through the whole long shift as though someone had paid it to watch. Eli Hodge, who had worked the Nant seam since he was fourteen, reckoned it had come down the valley with the frost and would leave with the first thaw. Nobody in Cwm Llwyd believed him. Ravens did not keep to thaws.

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Nell Pryce carried her brother's dinner up the slope every day the rescue crew worked, a tin of bara brith wrapped in a flour sack, though nobody had the heart to tell her the men below had stopped answering their hammers on the third day. The old oak stump at the top of the tip had been dead for years, its roots pale as bone, and they ran under the village like the veins in a leaf held to the light. She had dared her friends across those roots all through her childhood.

On the fifth morning the raven dropped from the headgear and walked the length of the tip with its head tilted, stopping wherever the coal dust had cracked into fine grey lines. It pecked at one line, then another, drawing them towards the shaft like thread pulled through cloth. Nell set down the tin and followed it, past Eli's lamp and the foreman's boots, until the bird stood on the lip of the pit mouth and looked back at her with one bright eye.

She picked up a shovel handle, the way the old men did, and knocked it three times against the iron rim of the shaft. For a long moment there was only the wind in the cables. Then, from far under the hill, something knocked back, three times, slow and certain. Behind her the raven lifted, and its shadow stayed on the coal a moment longer, reaching down into the dark like roots.