Side by side photos of two colour portrait tattoos of a moustached man with a raven and a feather, on a limb, in realism and neo-traditional styles.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two gothic portraits of a moustached man with a raven

Realism · Other · Mixed · Photo

The left photograph shows a realistic portrait of a moustached man in a dark cravat, with a black raven perched at his shoulder against a dark, smoky background. The right photograph shows a stylised neo-traditional portrait of the same kind of figure, with heavy shadowing around the eyes, a small cross above the brow, a red tie and a feather below. Both use smooth shading and saturated reds, blues and blacks, and each design fills the frame of its skin.

Realism Neo-trad Other Portrait Man Moustache Raven Feather Cross

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

At half past eleven the presses at the Gallowgate Courier had gone quiet, and Ambrose Keel was the last proofreader left on the third floor, running a red pencil down a column of obituaries. The gas lamps in Sallow Lane threw their yellow across the wet cobbles outside. He had been told to finish by midnight. Something tapped at the sash.

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A raven stood on the sill, its feathers the colour of coal smoke, one eye fixed on him as though he owed it money. Keel had never liked birds. He opened the window anyway, because the tapping kept a rhythm of three knocks and a pause, and that rhythm had started to match the line of type he could not stop hearing. The bird hopped onto his desk, stepped over the galley proofs, and stopped on a sheet headed "The Lamplighter's Wife", a serial he had not approved.

He read the line the bird was pointing at with its beak. The lamplighter's wife walked home by the canal at midnight, and the water kept her company. Keel had typed nothing like that; the editor had written it. Yet the ink looked freshly set, and when he touched it his thumb came away blue-black, the same dark shade as the silk at his own throat. Downstairs a door banged. The bird waited.

He picked up the pencil and, for the first time in eleven years, did not correct the line. Beneath it he wrote in careful capitals: SHE DOES NOT GO HOME. The raven bent its head as if satisfied, then lifted into the rain. By morning the paper had printed the sentence exactly as he wrote it, and nobody in Sallow Lane could say who had put it there.