Realistic colour tattoo of an eagle in flight in front of the American flag on an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Eagle and American flag on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A bald eagle with spread wings and extended yellow talons is shown in flight, with the American flag waving behind it. The feathers are shaded in greys and browns with fine detail, while the flag uses red, white and blue with a clean star field. The tattoo fills the upper arm in a close crop, with the eagle's wing tips reaching toward the shoulder.

Realism Upper arm Eagle American flag Star Stripe Talon Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hand me that rag and listen, because I'll only tell it once before the dew burns off. The eagle came down onto our strip in the summer of the big hail, a bald thing with a white collar like a bishop, and it sat on the windsock pole as if it had paid the rent. Nobody had the nerve to shoo it. Frank Lusk tried with a wheel iron and it looked at him the way a bank manager looks at a bounced cheque.

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It took to riding the thermals off the cut wheat, circling higher than my Stearman ever climbed, and every morning it came back to the flag we kept flying over the hangar. Frank said it was showing off. I said it was checking the stripes were straight. We had a bet going, a dollar a week, that it would steal a chicken from the Hendersons by August, and it never did. Instead, in September, Frank's boy took a bad fall off the grain elevator, and the eagle sat on the hangar roof for three days straight, never once looking at the road, only at the flag.

On the fourth morning the wind swung round out of the west and the flag tore loose from its clip. I was the only one there. I climbed the ladder with a coil of wire in my teeth, and the eagle lifted off the ridge and came down so close its wingtip brushed my cheek. Its talons took hold of the loose corner of the cloth and held it steady while I fixed the clip. Then it let go, dropped one grey feather onto my boot, and went off over the wheat. I still have the feather. Frank's boy walks again, and that flag hasn't torn since.