Photograph of a dark, detailed bird with spread wings tattooed on the upper back, seen from behind as the wearer looks away.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bird with spread wings on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A bird with outstretched wings, possibly a hawk or eagle, is tattooed on the upper back near the shoulder blade. The feathers are rendered with fine linework and soft grey and brown shading. The ink is mostly dark grey and black with warm tones from the lighting, and the bird fills the centre of the frame against the pale skin of the back.

Back Bird Wing Feather Eagle

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The shutter has come loose again, and snow is sifting across the flagstones of the taproom like flour through a sieve. You are halfway through counting the coal scuttles when the hawk drops out of the rafters and lands on the back of the settle, wings still half open, as if it has flown all day to reach you and hasn't finished arguing with the air.

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Its feathers are the colour of wet slate at the tips and something warmer near the shoulder, where the lamplight catches them. Mrs Abernethy, who has kept the Coldharbour Inn since before the pass closed, says hawks don't come down in a snowfall unless someone has called them. You tell her nobody has called anything in three days except the wind, and she gives you the look she keeps for drunk carters, the one that means she has already decided the matter is yours.

You find a leather glove in the back kitchen, the one your father wore for the ferrets, and hold out your arm the way he taught you. The bird considers the glove for a long time. Out in the drift the stranded coach bell clanks once, and the hawk turns its head towards the sound, then towards the door, then back to you.

When the snow stops at dawn, you open the front door onto a white so bright it hurts. The hawk lifts from your wrist without a sound, banks over the frozen mere, and climbs until it is only a mark against the peaks. Behind you Mrs Abernethy sets the kettle on the hob and says, to nobody in particular, that the pass will open by noon. It does.