Black and grey tattoo on the inner forearm showing two swordsmen silhouetted against a red moon, with a large raven perched on dark rocks beside them.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two swordsmen and a raven on a forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows two figures with raised swords standing on a dark, jagged rock formation under a red moon. A large raven sits on a separate rocky outcrop to the right, and faint mountain shapes sit behind it. The work is mostly black and grey with soft shading and textured rock detail, with small areas of red in the sky and the shadows.

Forearm Figure Sword Raven Crow Moon Rock Mountain

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are holding the guy ropes when the last of the big top sags, and Mattie Rook is already walking the blades across the fairground grass as if it were a Sunday in Margate. The show has been dying since Easter. The bulbs went in March, the lions went to a farm near Lewes in April, and now there is only the knife act, a rock flat built from hessian and chicken wire, and Old Sorrow, the raven, who sits on the empty lion cage and judges everyone.

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Ambrose and Teodor climb the painted crags with their swords raised while a red paper lantern, hung from a pole because the moon bulb failed, swings above them. Every clash makes the bird lift and settle again on the outcrop to the right, the one shaped like a broken molar, as if he were keeping score. Nobody has been paid for a fortnight. Ambrose says the raven is bad luck and that a company this unlucky should not carry a witness.

On the last evening Mrs Halloran sits you on an upturned crate and hands you the cage key. She has sold the cart to a scrapyard man in Crawley and the tent to a church youth club, and she wants the bird let go before the lorry comes. You walk him across the stubbled grass with a leather glove on your fist. Old Sorrow shifts his weight, looks at the blades catching the lantern light, then at the mountains painted on the backdrop, grey and far off.

You open your hand. The raven goes up in one heavy stroke, past the lantern, past the swordsmen frozen mid-duel, and the red paper light sways once and goes out. Behind you Mattie laughs and says the show is finished, and for the first time all season the field is quiet enough to hear the bird's wings going north.