Woman in profile with a raven on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A woman's profile faces left, eyes closed, with a large black raven wing rising behind her head and dark hair flowing down the arm. Thin, wispy outlines trail like smoke or swirling lines above and behind the figure, while soft grey and blue wash shading fills the hair. Small red-orange dots and patches on the cheek and forehead add the only warm colour against the dark ink and the pale skin.

Fine line Neo-trad Forearm Woman Profile Raven Wing Hair Swirl Smoke

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell kept the raven in a cage painted the green of old pennies, and she would let no one open it but me. I was sixteen that August, the year the travelling fair pitched on the water meadows below Stowe Marsh, and my job was carrying her tea across the mud from the generator wagon to the little booth with the moon painted on its flap. She drank it black and never thanked me. She just lifted her chin and said, "Mind the wet patch, Ruby, it has a temper."

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Most evenings the queue for her was long with courting couples and men wanting to know about debts. Nell took their coins and gave them nothing but a saucer of dried sage, which she lit with a match and fanned until the smoke rose in grey threads. Then she shut her eyes, the way a person does when they are listening to a far-off radio, and the raven lifted its great black wing and the smoke bent toward whoever was asking.

One Thursday a woman in a green coat sat down without speaking. She wanted to know where her brother had gone, the one who had walked off the Bristol train three winters back. Nell didn't open her eyes. She said, "He is not lost. He is only somewhere the smoke has not yet been asked." The woman left a bent sixpence on the cloth and went out into the dusk without looking back.

When the fair folded that October and the meadows went back to cows, Nell gave me the cage and told me to open it on the road north. The raven stepped onto my wrist, heavy as a wet glove, and turned its head to the smoke still hanging over the empty booth. A letter came from Carlisle the next spring, in a hand I didn't know, asking whether a girl called Nell had been seen. I wrote back that she had shut her eyes, and that I could not say where she had gone.