Traditional style tattoo on the upper arm of a shield-shaped military patch with a white eagle head, an Airborne tab and the words Military Police and Operation Iraqi Freedom III-IV.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Airborne eagle patch with Military Police lettering

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a shield-shaped military patch with a white eagle head in profile, a yellow beak and a yellow-lettered AIRBORNE tab across the top. The words MILITARY POLICE sit above the shield and OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM III-IV sits below, all in plain block lettering. The shield is shaded in grey and black with soft gradients, while the eagle, tab and beak carry the colour, and the design is centred on the arm.

Traditional Upper arm Eagle Shield

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The eagle came to Scarrow Sands in the pocket of a man who would not sign the register. He arrived on the last bus of September with a canvas kitbag and a felt shield stitched at the shoulder, and he asked Mrs Penhale for the room at the top, the one that looked over the harbour wall and not the car park. She gave it him for nothing, because he stood in her doorway like a gatepost and she thought it unlucky to argue with a gatepost.

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He walked the harbour wall after dark with a torch he never switched on. The gulls and the boys who threw chips at them called him the Corporal, though he never said what he had been before. Once, when Mrs Penhale asked what his old work had been, he said he had spent his years making sure the others kept to the rules, and that it was a lonely job because the others never thanked you for it.

In November a fishing boat came in through the fog with no lights showing. Nobody saw him go down the steps, but in the morning the boat was tied fast at the quay, the crew were alive and cursing, and the Corporal's room was empty, the bed made tight enough to bounce a coin. On the inside of the landing window, where the breath of the house had fogged the glass, someone had drawn a white eagle's head in profile, its beak picked out in yellow.

Mrs Penhale kept the room made up through the winter. In March she found the kitbag folded at the foot of the bed with a card tucked under the strap. It had four lines in block capitals: THREE TOURS. ONE STORM. ROOM HELD. Below them, smaller, someone had written that the light on the wall was to be left burning for the boats.