Two mirrored black and grey raven tattoos with sketchy linework and dotwork shading, one on each thigh.

Twin raven tattoos on thighs

Dotwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

Two mirrored raven tattoos sit side by side on the upper thighs, each showing a bird with an open-beaked head, layered feathers on the wing and chest, and clawed feet gripping a lower edge. The linework is loose and sketch-like, with extended overlapping lines, while the feathers and body are filled with fine stippled dotwork that builds soft grey shading. The image is entirely black and grey, and the tattoos fill most of the frame against pale skin with dark fabric at the top edge.

Dotwork Blackwork Thigh Raven Crow Bird Feather Talon Claw

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hall still smells of floor polish and warm squash, and across the room Owen Pryce is holding a paper cup like it might go off. You clock him before he clocks you. Twenty-six years, and he still stands with his weight on one hip, as though the lino might tip him out.

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Everyone called you the Hadley ravens, because the two of you sat on the wall by the bike sheds every lunchtime, black coats buttoned to the neck, shouting at anyone who came near the bins. Owen went to sea at eighteen. You stayed and sold insurance in Rochdale, and the years did what years do. The school photo from 1998 still has you both in the front row, two dark heads leaning the same way, and nobody has ever been able to say which of you was the reflection.

He crosses the hall without speaking and holds out the cup. "Still got the penknife?" "Pawnbroker in Oldham has it." "Good. Wasn't yours to keep." You laugh, and it comes out sounding like your father's. He tells you the boat was called the Corvina, and that the cook used to feed gulls off the stern and swear they came back every watch. He says he has been trying to ring you for three years.

Outside, the wall is gone, replaced by a car park with its white lines faded to nothing. You sit on the kerb anyway. Under the sodium light your shadows stretch across the tarmac, one wing folded tight, the other flung wide, and for once neither of you tries to make the other one move.