Line drawing of two ravens in green and blue ink, each with a column of runic characters across its body, shown as a tattoo design without placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two ravens with runes

Mixed · Flash

Two stylised birds, probably ravens, face in opposite directions, one drawn in green and the other in blue. Each bird is outlined with a single sweeping brush line, with its feet and beak picked out in simple strokes. Short runic characters run down the body of each bird on a pale background.

Raven Bird Crow Rune

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The old woman at Hallsvík kept her two ravens on the same perch and sent them in opposite directions every morning, because a bird that faces the sea sees only sea. Sorn went east over the salt flats with the tide tables scratched into his feathers, and Tarv went west toward the headland where the boats came in. Nobody had taught them to read. The runes were the old woman's doing, cut fine with a knife, and she said they were only reminders to come home.

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Tarv came back first that autumn, his blue gone grey at the wingtips, and dropped onto the sill with a torn strip of sail in his beak. He did not speak. The woman took the cloth and held it to the window. Eleven boats had gone out past the skerries and only nine had been seen again. She put the cloth in the fire and said nothing, and the bird watched her face the way a man watches weather.

Sorn did not return that night, nor the next. On the third morning the woman walked down to the shingle with her shawl pulled tight and found him standing in the surf-line, green as weed, one leg hooked around a cracked oar. She carried him up under her arm. He was heavier than a bird should be, and when she set him on the sill she saw that he had been carrying a stone all the way from the east, lodged in the crook of his wing, a smooth grey pebble with a hole worn through it.

She hung the pebble on a thread beside the window. Each morning after that the two birds sat with their backs to each other, one watching the sea and one watching the room, so that between them they never missed anything that mattered. The runes on their breasts had faded to pale lines, but she could still read them, and they said the same thing they always had: go, and come back.