Realistic raven and smoke swirl on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A raven in profile sits within a dark circular backdrop on the forearm, with its head, beak and feathered wings rendered in detail. A pale, wispy band of smoke-like shading curls across the design and wraps around the arm, adding movement. The piece uses only black and grey ink with soft gradients, and the photograph is shot against a plain dark background.

Realism Forearm Raven Bird Smoke Swirl Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last tent still standing at Ashby Common had a raven on its centre pole, and nobody could say who had let it in. The Fenwick Brothers' Travelling Show had sold the elephant to a farm in Lincolnshire and the lion had died in the wet spring, but the raven stayed. It sat above the ticket hatch and watched the mud fill the footprints of crowds that no longer came.

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Old Tobias Lark, who kept the lamps, said the bird was the show's luck and had been since his father's day. Every evening he lit the paraffin lamps along the ring, and every evening the smoke rose and curled up under the canvas, and the raven turned its head to follow it like a man reading a letter. Mr Fenwick said the bird ate the popcorn and frightened the children. He said it in the voice of a man who had stopped believing his own sums.

On the last Saturday in October the smoke did not rise. It hung low over the sawdust and wound itself round the pole in a long pale band, as if the tent had made up its mind to leave. Lark watched the raven drop from its perch and walk the length of the ring, stopping at each empty seat. Then it lifted, circled the lamps three times, and went out through the high vent into a sky the colour of pewter.

Mr Fenwick woke the next morning to find the canvas folded neatly on the grass and a single black feather laid on the ticket table. Lark said the bird had taken the luck with it, though he also admitted the show had been finished for years and the raven had only been waiting for someone to notice. They packed the lamps into the back of the lorry. The smoke, Lark said, went with them as far as the Lincoln road.