Black script lettering reading night gathers, and now my watch begins, with two black raven silhouettes, tattooed along the side of a torso on the ribs.

Two ravens and a script quote along the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two solid black bird silhouettes, one at the upper left and one at the lower right, with a line of cursive script between them reading night gathers, and now my watch begins. The lettering is black with smooth, even strokes and the birds are filled solid black with no shading. The photograph shows only the side of a torso in a black top and denim shorts, with the tattoo running diagonally across the skin.

Lettering Ribs Raven Crow Bird Quote Script Silhouette

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourselves down on the upturned crate, Danny, and mind the tar. No, not that one, that's where Old Pauline keeps her knitting. There. Now listen, because I'll not tell it twice and the kettle's nearly boiled.

Keep reading

The ravens came to Scarrow Haven the winter the Mary Ellen went down off the Skerries with eleven men aboard. Nobody saw her go. The harbour master's wife kept a lamp in her window every night after that, and the birds took to sitting on the breakwater posts facing the sea, black as coal sacks, never once flying off to feed. Maggie Tenant, who kept the lookout hut on the north wall, swore they were counting boats back in. She chalked the words on the slate by her door so she'd remember the rule her father taught her: night gathers, and now my watch begins. Then she climbed up and kept it.

Every evening the fleet came in, Maggie stood on the wall with her flag and her tally board, and the ravens shifted along their posts to let her by. Eleven boats, then nine, then twelve when the lost crew's cousins came home from Aberdeen with a hull they'd bought off a widow. Nobody asked her to keep watch. She just did, right up until the year her hands got too stiff to wave the flag.

So here's the thing about ravens. The morning after Maggie's last watch, the posts were bare. And on the slate by her hut, someone had chalked one more line under her words, a single name, Tenant, and beside it a tick for one boat coming home.