Black and grey realism back tattoo of a woman in a fedora with a band across her eyes, two ravens and handwritten script covering the upper back.

Woman in fedora and birds on a full back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large back tattoo shows a woman in a fedora with a strip of fabric or paper across her eyes, set against a background of handwritten script and loose framing lines. Two birds, likely ravens or crows, sit in the upper corners, and a small tag reading 585 appears near the lower centre. The work is in black and grey with smooth tonal shading on the portrait and bolder, sketchy black strokes in the surrounding collage.

Realism Back Woman Portrait Raven Bird Handwriting Script Number Collage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The letters came aboard at Brentford in a tea chest lined with oilcloth, and by the time we reached Teddington every one of them had been read by somebody who had no business reading them. Mother said that was the river's habit. It took what it was given and handed back the pages out of order.

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I kept the ledger for the Mary Ann, which meant I wrote down what went in and what came out. The crate stamped 585 was the one nobody would sign for. Its lid had been nailed twice. Inside, under a bolt of grey wool, lay a stack of envelopes addressed in one looping hand to a Miss Hale, care of the Swan at Kingston. Ravens had followed us since the lock at Hammersmith, black shapes sitting on the coping, watching the cargo the way clerks watch a queue.

The woman in the fedora came to the Swan on a Thursday. She wore a strip of linen across her eyes, which she said was for the glare off the water, and she did not ask after the crate. She asked whether the letters had been opened. I told her the truth, that each one had been slit with a hot knife and sealed again, and she laughed, a short sound like a cork coming out of a bottle. Then she pulled the linen tighter and said she could still read them by touch.

I gave her the ledger. She ran her thumb down the column, stopped at 585, and said, "That isn't a lot number. That's the year I stopped writing back." The ravens lifted off the barge roof all at once, and the river took the light off their wings as they went.