Double-headed eagle tattoo with a gold crown and a red and white cross shield, placed on the side of the ribs.

Double-headed eagle with crown on ribs

Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A double-headed eagle wears a gold crown and holds a shield on its chest with a white cross on red panels. The wings and feathers are drawn in grey outline with light shading, while the crown, talons and shield carry yellow, red and white colour. The design sits along the side of the ribs, and a hand holding up a dark top is visible above it.

Ribs Eagle Crown Shield Cross Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are seventeen the winter the crest above the waiting-room door starts to flake, and Mrs Pell hands you a tin of gold leaf, a stiff brush and a ladder that wobbles on the sixth rung. She says the eagle has two heads so that one can watch the up line and the other the down, and nothing has to turn its back on anything. You don't ask her what happens when a train comes through the middle.

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The red is the problem. The original pigment went with the last stationmaster, so you boil cherry varnish with rust scraped from the coal-bunker gate until it looks like the shield in the photograph Mrs Pell keeps in her tea caddy. The white cross has to stay bare, she says, because it marks the crossroads, though nobody has crossed it in forty years. You paint the four red panels one at a time, and each evening the damp has lifted the last one back to grey.

On the night you reach the claws, a goods train thunders underneath and a gust rips a fine feather from your brush hand. It lands on the platform like a dropped match. The county inspector arrives the next morning, squints up, and says the bird looks remarkably new. Mrs Pell says nothing. She just taps the foot of the ladder twice, the way you tap a clock to make it keep time.

When the inspector has gone, you climb up one last time to touch the gilt on the crown. You notice you have painted the left head so that it is facing the same platform as the right, both of them staring at the same empty track. You meant to fix it. Instead you lean down and tell Mrs Pell it is finished, and she nods as if she had always known the two of them would end up looking the same way.