Black and grey tattoo of two ravens perched on a bare branch across the inner wrist, shown from two angles.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two ravens on a branch on a wrist

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two black crows or ravens perched on a bare, twisting branch that wraps around the wrist. The birds are filled with solid black ink with soft grey highlights on their feathers and a pale eye on each bird, while the branch is drawn with sharp black strokes and fine offshoots. The photo is shown as two side-by-side views of the same wrist, with a dark background.

Forearm Raven Crow Bird Branch Twig

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ravens arrived on the canal wall the week the lock keeper died, two of them, black as shoe polish, and took the dead sycamore as if they had been sent to inspect it. I was working nights then at the bakery on Dock Street, and on my way home at two in the morning I started leaving crusts on the coping stone. The bigger bird, the one with a notch in its left wing, always came down first. The other sat on the branch and watched me with an eye so pale it looked lit from inside.

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Mrs Adair from the cottage by the lock told me on a wet Thursday that her husband had kept birds like these, and that they only settled where somebody was waiting up for someone who was late. I laughed at her. Then my brother Danny's last train from Carlisle was cancelled, and he rang from a payphone at eleven to say he would walk it, and I sat on the wall with the bread in my lap, cold, unable to go in.

Around half past three the notched raven hopped along the branch until it was level with my face. It cocked its head the way Danny used to when he was about to tell a lie he thought was clever. The other bird lifted off without a sound, low over the water, towards the railway bridge. I thought of it going to meet him, and I felt foolish, and then less foolish, because the path lights along the towpath were coming on one by one, as if someone was walking them up towards the town.

Danny came round the bend at ten past four, soaked to the knees, grinning. The notched bird was gone. In the morning the bread was still on the coping stone, every crumb of it, and I understood that they had never been hungry at all.