Black and grey ink drawing of a raven with spread wings perched on a goblet, a tattoo design shown as flash with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Raven with spread wings on a chalice

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A raven with wide, spread wings sits on the rim of a footed goblet or chalice. The wings and body are rendered in bold solid black with white highlight outlines, and the goblet is shaded in greys to suggest its curved bowl and stem. The design is centred on a plain pale background with no other elements.

Blackwork Raven Bird Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mags Tolliver had worked the narrowboat Hesper for thirty-one years and had never let a bird ride her roof. The raven came off the lock gate at Cassock Lock on a grey Tuesday in March, settled on the chimney cowl, and stayed there while she poled the boat out onto the wide reach below the mill. Its wings hung half open, each feather edged in a thin line of pale light, as if someone had drawn it with a fine brush and then rubbed the black back in around the outline.

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Dunstan had dragged the cup out of the silt under the weir the week before. It was a footed goblet, heavy for its size, its bowl gone the colour of wet slate and its stem banded with ridges that caught the light. He wanted a dealer in Wrexbridge to price it. Mags wrapped it in sacking and shut it in the front locker, and every evening after that the raven walked the cabin roof, tapping the tin with its beak, until she gave up and went to bed. One night she lifted the locker lid and found the bird perched on the rim of the cup, wings spread wide over the bowl like a hand shading a lamp.

She tried the boathook first. The bird lifted, circled once above the towpath, and came back to the same rim as if it had never left. Dunstan laughed until he saw her face, then went quiet and offered to row. They took the cup back to the weir at dusk, Mags in the stern and the raven on the bow rail, and set it on the flat stone where it had lain in the current. The bird stepped across to the goblet, looked at her with one dark eye, and lifted off towards the west.

Next morning the chimney cowl was bare. In the locker the sacking lay folded square, dry as a biscuit, with a single black feather laid across it like a bookmark.