Traditional style tattoo on a forearm showing a woman's face with a raven perched on her head and a red rose with green leaves below.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Woman with raven and rose on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A traditional style tattoo of a woman's face with pale skin, red cheeks and lips, and grey shaded hair in curled waves. A black raven sits on top of her head, and a red rose with dark green leaves sits at the lower right of the forearm. Bold black outlines, grey shading and red and green colour fill the design on a photographed forearm resting on a blue paper sheet.

Traditional Forearm Woman Raven Crow Rose Leaves Face

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Agnes Ferrier wouldn't have the raven in her cottage, so it spent the winter perched on the toll gate instead, turning its head to watch whoever came up the pass with a cart. I came up the Black Stell road in October with forty sacks of salt and a bad knee, and she stood in the doorway with her grey curls pinned up like a crown she had no intention of wearing. She looked at the rope round my load, then at the bird, then at me. 'It'll have your ear if you stare,' she said. 'Then I'll stare back,' I said, and she laughed, which I hadn't expected.

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She kept a red rose in a tin bucket by the step, the only thing in that valley that flowered out of season. Her husband had brought the cutting from Carlisle the year the road washed away, and he'd died the winter after, though she never said of what. 'Every soul who crosses leaves a coin on the gate,' she told me. 'The bird takes the coin. I give the bird a rose, so it knows what it's keeping.' I paid my toll in copper, and the raven took it from the post without hurry.

I came back over the pass in April with an empty cart and found the gate unlatched and the bucket knocked over. The raven was gone. Agnes was gone too, though her door stood open and the kettle was still warm. On the gatepost, pressed flat under a grey stone, lay a single red petal, and I took it down the mountain with me in my shirt pocket, where it stayed for years.