Captain America eagle and anchor flash

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A colour flash design showing Captain America in profile, framed by a rope border, with a spread-wing eagle holding a star shield in front of crossed anchors. Two American flags sit behind the figure, and a scroll banner at the base reads FOREVER YOUNG. The bold outlines and solid fills are shaded with warm reds, blues, golds and browns on an aged parchment-style background.

Traditional Neo-trad Eagle Anchor Shield American flag Banner Rope Star Bird

Find an artist for this

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

Mrs Ivy Coaker ran the boarding house at Saltmere for thirty-one years, and she tied a knot in every lodger's key cord before she handed it over. The knot was for luck, she said, and the luck was for coming back. When a tall, quiet man came up from the harbour in the wet March of 1931 with a round painted shield strapped to his pack, she tied his knot without asking his name and took his money in advance.

Keep reading

He stayed eleven nights. Each morning he walked to the end of the pier and stood with the shield held low, watching the smacks come in under their brown sails. The harbour men said he was waiting for a boat that had gone down past the Scar in the war, and that the flags on the lifeboat house flew stiffer every time he passed. Mrs Coaker said that was nonsense, then gave him the bread knife to sharpen, because he had good hands and she had none left for knives.

On the twelfth morning a boy from the lifeboat crew brought up a bundle of sodden bunting from the nets, two flags with the stripes gone grey and the stars still bright. The man unfolded them on the kitchen table, asked for the old rusted anchor from the cellar, and lashed the flags to its shank with the coiled cord from his own key. At low tide he walked it out along the mole and set it down where the sea would reach it first. Above the lifeboat doors the faded words read FOREVER YOUNG, and he touched them once as he passed, like a man checking a promise.

When Mrs Coaker climbed to his room that afternoon the bed was made tight, the shield was gone, and her key sat on the windowsill with the knot undone. Beside it lay a single grey gull feather. She never charged for that room again, and she kept the feather in the drawer with the spare keys, where it stayed dry.