Black and grey double-headed eagle tattoo on a woman's upper back, with handwritten script lettering to its right, shown in a close-up below.

Double-headed eagle on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A double-headed eagle with outspread wings sits centrally on the upper back, with a crest-like body and detailed feather shading. Beside it on the right is a line of black script lettering, partly cut off by the frame. The top photo shows the wider view with a pink tank top, and the lower photo is a close crop of the tattoo in black and grey tones.

Back Eagle Script Lettering Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The crest came down with the lintel in March, when the council men with the hydraulic breaker knocked out the old chapel on Harrow Lane. Dessie Lowry caught it before it hit the skip, two hundredweight of Portland stone, the eagle's wings still sharp at the edges where his grandfather had cut them. Nobody else on the crew wanted it, so it went onto the flatbed with the rubble and then up the service lift of Carrow House, sixteen floors, where Dessie had a flat with a broken boiler and a view of nothing.

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He propped it against the bin store on the landing outside flat 14, and every morning for a week he walked past it with his keys in his fist. The two heads looked east and west at once, which his grandfather used to say was the trick of it: a bird that could not be taken by surprise from either side. Dessie had never managed that. He worked nights on the sorting line at the depot and slept through the afternoons with the curtains pinned shut.

On the Sunday the lift stuck between floors nine and ten, and Dessie climbed the rest with his phone torch. A woman from flat 22 was on the landing, half laughing, holding a carrier bag of tins. She had been trying to get down to the bins for an hour, and she looked at the stone and then at him. "Your granddad's?" she asked. He nodded. "Then he'd want it somewhere it gets seen," she said, and between them they dragged it back to the lift.

They bolted it above the entrance on the ground floor, beside the intercom panel, where the wind came under the canopy and the pigeons had given up on it. Dessie still walked past every night. Now he touched one wing on the way in, the way you might touch a doorframe for luck, and the stone was always cold.