Black and grey raven with an eye on its wing, perched on tree roots that run down the calf, in a traditional style tattoo.

Raven with eye and roots on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A raven perches on twisting branches and roots that run down the lower leg, with a pale sun or moon outline behind its head. The bird is shaded in black and grey, with an eye drawn on its wing and hatched lines across the feathers. The design fills the length of the calf and is photographed against a dark wooden floor.

Traditional Blackwork Calf Raven Bird Eye Branches Root Sun Moon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The raven had roosted on the same dead larch above Hob's Gap since the thaw, and Tamsin Rook had stopped trying to shift it. Carters said it was the drowned miller's soul, come up to watch the road he never finished. It turned its head to follow every cart that came up from the valley, always as if it were looking at something just behind them.

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That November the snow came early and sideways, and Eli Cobb's wagon did not come over the top by dark. Tamsin lit the storm lamp and stood in the doorway of the toll hut, cursing the weather and the carters and the bird, which had dropped from its branch and was walking slowly down the roots. The larch's roots ran from the crest all the way down the scree, pale and knotted like veins under the snow, and the raven followed them one hop at a time, stopping to look back at her each time she fell behind.

She went after it with the lamp held low. The eye on its wing caught the light and seemed to open, and somewhere below the second bend Tamsin understood that the bird was not leading her to Eli. It was counting the roots, the way the old miller had counted sluice gates before the flood. Where the roots thickened she found the wagon on its side, one wheel still turning, and Eli wedged under the tailboard with his leg bent wrong but his breath steaming.

She got him out with the rope from the hut and her own shoulder under his arm. When they reached the top again the raven was back on the larch, watching the road as before, and the snow had already filled their tracks. Tamsin hung the lantern from the dead branch beside it. By morning the lamp had burned out, and the raven had left the larch to perch on the rope, as if it were the one that needed keeping.