What the Ravens Carry
Updated: Aug 31
I pull into Tacoma and park outside the little studio tucked inside a second-hand antiques co-op. It is not the kind of place you would expect to find someone whose work can occupy two full days of your life. I sit in the car for a moment before going inside.
I am not afraid of the needle. I am not wondering what the tattoo will look like. The drawings have already been made. (I haven’t seen them) The decision has already been made. What I feel is something closer to standing at the edge of a forest just before stepping between the trees.
For more than a year, I have been carrying this tattoo around in my head. I have written about it, painted it, thought about it while walking through the woods. I have written the meanings of the ravens on cards and taped them to my refrigerator, my bathroom mirror, beside my computer. I have been listening for something. Now there is nothing left to listen for.
There is only the act of going inside.
Last year, I saw that my tattoo artist would be back in the area, so I quickly jumped on his waitlist. It would give me a year and a half to fully contemplate what I wanted for my third tattoo.
The pieces I have are large, fine-line, and highly detailed. The first was a Nootka Rose, a wild primrose that grows locally, on my left shoulder. It holds the meaning of honoring my soul dog, Rose, my grandmother, and myself. The second tattoo is on my left side. It is the view of Mount Baker -Koma Kulshan- from my family's homestead farm. A Western Red Cedar and a Madrone frame the water.
Both tattoos are deeply personal and meaningful to me. Each element has a place in my heart and mind, as well as in the artwork.
This one was different.
At first, I wasn't sure what I wanted to get. My life felt like it was in turmoil, and I was coming to grips with the idea that the future I had planned, the one I had banked so much hope and expectation on, had evaporated. Some people would tattoo the struggle. I didn't want to. I didn't like the idea of carrying a permanent mark that memorialized the struggle so directly. If I was going to put something like that on my body, it needed to be about myself. My response. My growth. What came after. Not about the events themselves.
And, sticking with my desire to make my body a map of the Pacific Northwest, it had to contain things I see in everyday life. The plants. The birds. The landscape I had grown up around.
Back in February of 2026, the artist reached out to tell me he had an opening in August. So I sat down and started coming up with a few ideas. I was in a really dark and difficult space during this time. My body felt like it was betraying me. My weight was out of control, my hormones were all over the place, and my mind felt like it was on fire. I had recently found out more troubling details about my past relationship. Apparently, I had spent a long time choosing to blind myself to what was right in front of me. It had been there all along.
I let the idea of love blind me.
At this point, I had also been stood up on a few dates, had some people I had gone on dates with not go particularly well, and had been taken advantage of emotionally, romantically, and financially.
I was exhausted.
More than anything, I was exhausted with myself.
How could I have been so blind on so many occasions? How could I keep walking into the flames and not see how badly I was already burned? The hopeless romantic in me, the part of me that wanted connection, kept reaching outward and overpowering the sane and aware side of me. The side that already knew better.
A Friendly Voice Calls to Me
I was trying to come up with a theme, an idea of what to include that would capture everything I was feeling, what I wanted to feel, and still be made up of symbols of my home. One particularly cold day, I had a fire going in the fireplace at home. The wood was running low, so I walked out to my woodshed to gather a few pieces. From somewhere unseen, just beyond, I heard:
“Cuck-ickle... Cuck-ickle... cawwwwww, caww, caw.”
It was a raven.
There has been a nesting pair that frequents the property, and hearing one was like hearing a familiar friend talking from the other side of the room. I might not know what they are saying, but there is something about recognizing a voice. Your mind may not understand the words, but something in you knows the sound.
Back in the house, the raven still on my mind, I sat in front of the fireplace and restuffed the box. To my right was a small end table by the couch. On it sat some special picture books. One was a childhood favorite, Brother Eagle, Sister Sky. It is maybe fifteen pages long, but the illustrations are beautiful, with pen and color depicting First Nations people and the environment. The text is a speech given by Chief Seattle.
On top of it sat a book I picked up in May of 2025 on a life-journey trip with my grandmother and my eldest cousin. We went to Iceland. One of the things grandma wanted to see was the puffins. The book is about a small island off the coast of Iceland where most of the puffins have their nests. When it is time for the baby pufflings to learn to fly, many become distracted by the town's lights and end up on roads and in people's yards. The island comes together to gather them, nurture them, and send them off to sea.
Both books opened a series of memories for me.
Pitching the Pufflings to Find Another Little Bird
On that Iceland trip, on our final night, my cousin and I went to pick up some beer from a local brewery and some dinner while Grandma took a nap. The summer midnight sun had really messed with her internal clock, so she was often taking naps. When we returned, it was eleven at night. She was fully awake and a little confused about why the sun was still so high while the clock insisted it was nighttime. We hung out in our little hotel room, talking about the trip, and cracked open the six-pack of high-proof beers we had brought home from the brewery.
My cousin and I were already well lubricated.
After the second one, Grandma seemed to be catching up.
Perhaps because this was a trip that was supposed to happen when my cousin and I had graduated high school and were making that transition from child to adult, we asked if she would read us the children's book about the pufflings as a bedtime story.
So my cousin, a 43-year-old man, and I, a 42-year-old woman, put on our pajamas and sat on the edge of the bed while Grandma began to read to us. It was an incredibly touching moment. It was also hilarious. Halfway through the book, we couldn't stop laughing.
Grandma has dyslexia, and has it really bad. In fact, that is in a way how we discovered that I had it when I was a child. I never had a problem reading her handwriting. It made sense to me. When she is reading something, she goes with what she thinks the word might be, not always what it actually is. So, as you can imagine, the three of us are fairly sauced at this point. She is reading a story about pufflings, but is interjecting words that don't make sense to the story and coming up with lines that are so odd and weird.
She knows it too. We are smiling and laughing.
As the story comes to an end, we end up talking about other birds, and both my cousin and I talk about wanting to get an Anna's Hummingbird as part of a tattoo. These hummingbirds frequent our grandmother's home, and her refilling the feeders is a core memory for both of us. To see that hummingbird makes us both think of the summers we spent with our grandparents.
At this point, Grandma loves that we want to get hummingbird tattoos. She has no tattoos of her own and has been pretty adverse to the idea, but she loves her grandchildren. In a slightly tipsy moment of courage, she boasts:
“I am going to get one too.”
I just happened to be recording a little video as a memory for my cousin and me when I caught her saying this.
“Oh? Heck yeah, Grandma. This will be awesome.”
That memory stayed with me.
The Ravens Return
Thinking of Iceland, and of birds carrying memories across distance and time, I was reminded of Odin's Ravens, Huginn and Muninn. In Norse mythology, Huginn represents thought and Muninn represents memory. Odin sends them out into the world, and they return with what they have seen and learned.
Thought and memory.
One looking outward.
One looking backward.
Neither is enough on its own.
Back on the shores of my home, the raven carries its own complicated history. Among Coastal First Nations, Raven can be the shapeshifter, the trickster, the bringer of life, and the keeper of secrets. A creature that changes shape. A creature that reveals what is hidden. A creature that knows something you do not.
That idea stayed with me.
I had it.
The core elements of the tattoo would be two ravens, an Anna's Hummingbird, and two more local plants that I love and feel are often overlooked, even though they are critical to the lifeblood of the environment here: Salmonberry and Salal. I sent my concepts, what they meant to me, and a rough idea of size off to the artist. He had done my other tattoos, so I had complete faith that whatever he came up with would perfectly match me.
The weekend of the tattoo arrived. We had discussed some additional details over the past few months, including the expected size, but otherwise I had no idea what to expect. For some reason, I felt called to go bigger with this one. Instead of taking six to eight hours, it would take two full days.
I had been mentally preparing for this.
Writing reflections about what I hoped the finished piece would mean. Doing paintings and meditative work around the core themes. Spending time walking in the woods and looking more closely at the natural world around me. I posted some of these writings and paintings on my fridge, the bathroom mirror, next to my work computer. Everywhere I would have to see them.
A few of them stuck with me so deeply that I can close my eyes now and see the handwriting seared into my vision, like the logo of an old television station burned into the screen after watching the same channel for too long.
What felt right in the lead-up to the weekend was to think of the Ravens as Odin's Ravens. In time, they will shapeshift and more secrets will be revealed. When the time is right, and I have been deemed worthy, perhaps the Raven will open the path for healing. For now, and the near future, they are Huginn and Muninn.
Huginn is my active intellect. The side of me that analyzes and plans. The one that looks for the present moment and tries to see what comes next. Huginn would be my growth. Munin, the raven of my memory, is my introspection and my experience. Munin would be my foundation.
Much like the trees that grace my left side, the path ahead I was seeking could not exist without both earth and sky. Earth to ground me and remind me where I have been. It holds the evidence of past growth, destruction, scars on the land, and the places where I learned to find fertile soil.
At the same time, I am reaching for the sky and growing upward. The tree does not exist without both. It cannot grow without the earth beneath it, but it cannot grow without the sky above it either. Neither can I.
“Vulnerability is the price of wisdom.”
I saw this presented as a poor translation of one of the old Norse poems, and it struck me hard. I wrote it on a card along with the meanings of the Ravens and placed the card on my fridge. For the final week before the tattoo, I grabbed that card every day, walked out into nature, and sat with it.
Repeating those words.
“Vulnerability is the price of wisdom.”
The Transformation Begins
Then I pulled into Tacoma. I parked outside the little studio tucked inside the second-hand antiques co-op. It was time.
He showed me a few rough sketches for ideas. We played around with the size and overall layout, and then he sketched on my back and shoulder what he thought it should look like. A raven would sit on my upper arm, looking toward my back, perched in the branches. The other raven would be in flight on my back, looking forward. Between the two would sit the hummingbird.
I took a deep breath.
This was it.
Sitting down for the first portion, he had the tattoo gun in hand, some music playing in the background. I was about to slip on my own headphones. He said that for this first day he was going to focus on the raven on my arm. The raven looking behind me. The seated raven.
This is Munin. Today is going to be a day of memory.
Right as I was about to turn on my music, a piece I was all too familiar with came through his speaker. It was a piece that carried profound meaning for me and memories of my former partner. A piece we had performed to. Something I had not been able to listen to since the breakup.
“This is it” I mouthed silently.
The first few needle strikes hit. And I began walking through the memories. Many of them were painful. Some had haunted me for a long time. But I was not looking at them from a place of anger anymore. They were things that happened.
That was all.
They were part of my story, and I could not escape that. The part I could own was how I responded, and how I was choosing to respond now. Over the next eight hours, something in me changed. Not dramatically. Not all at once. But enough that I noticed. By the end of day one, I was spent emotionally. My body felt raw, but manageable.
Day two was nine hours. The more elaborate back piece. The branches. The hummingbird. All of the fine details. And the other raven. The one looking forward. I started the session with a song I had found back in February, an homage to future planning and changing chapters. My mind felt free and open at this point.
The first day had been about looking behind me. This day felt different. I was not trying to make the past into something it wasn't. I was not trying to figure out how I could have changed it. I was thinking about what came next.
When the second day finally came to an end, I looked at myself in the mirror and saw something I had spent months trying to understand.
The tattoo is there.
Permanent.
Impossible to ignore.
The ravens.
The hummingbird.
The branches.
The plants.
All of the things I had carried in my head for so long were now carried on my skin.
But the tattoo was not a monument to what had happened to me.
It was a reminder of what I had done with it.
For a long time, I thought moving forward meant leaving things behind. I thought healing meant getting far enough away from the pain that I could eventually stop thinking about it. But I have come to understand that memory does not have to be an anchor. It can be a foundation.
Munin reminds me where I have been.
Huginn reminds me that I still have somewhere to go.
I cannot change the things that happened.
I cannot rewrite the choices I made.
I cannot pretend I did not ignore things I should have seen.
Those things are part of my story now.
But they no longer have to determine what happens next.
There is something comforting about knowing that I will never have to rely entirely on memory to remember this version of myself. The woman who sat in the woods, holding a card that said, “Vulnerability is the price of wisdom,” will always be with me. So will the woman who walked into that tattoo studio carrying all of the things she had been trying to understand.
She is there on my skin now.
Every morning when I get dressed, every time I catch a glimpse of the ravens in a mirror, every time someone asks me about the tattoo, I will have another opportunity to remember.
Not the pain.
The change.
I am grateful for that.
Because I know myself well enough to know that someday the details will soften.
The anger will fade.
The sharp edges of certain memories will become dull.
I will grow older.
I will change again.
Perhaps I will become someone I cannot yet imagine.
That is what the tattoo is for.
It is not meant to keep me in this moment.
It is meant to remind me that I was here.
That I listened.
That I changed.
That I survived the fire without becoming the fire.
And that wherever the path leads next, I do not have to forget where I came from to keep moving forward.
BOOK: Brother Eagle, Sister Sky - Susan Jeffers This is a children's book, and it is one of the only books I remember so strongly reading as a kid, that I made a point of going back and picking it up as an adult to have a copy of it in my house.
SONG: Cold Little Heart - Michael Kiwanuka
This album came on after I met some incredible people in February that really helped begin to change my life. They are my muse, and I call meeting them Kismet. When the song came on I just played it over and over. On the second day of the tattoo, as I was about to start, this is the song I chose to play as I thought of the future.
Check out the Substack for more details about the books I mentioned
Thank you for reading my post. This post/essay, like many of the ones I write, is a blend of my personal experiences, travel, memories, stories, and shared conversations. These solely represent myself and my opinions and thoughts. When it involves personal friends I have given them nicknames unless they have given explicit permission to use their given name. There are times that I am able to pull from what I wrote down in my journals at the time an event happened, others I am trying to recall memories that have been altered by brain injuries and a lifetime of simply living. I may not always get it right, so please forgive me for some unintentional variations.
I always welcome feedback and thoughts on my posts. Please feel free to send me an email or comment below.
Love from the road,
Nic & Rally
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