Black linework flash design of a totem pole topped by a spread-winged eagle, with stacked animal faces and patterned wings, shown on a white background.

Eagle and animal totem pole design

Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical totem pole design with a large eagle at the top, its wings spread wide, above several stacked animal faces. The linework is bold and black, with dense inner patterning on the feathers and faces. The drawing is shown in black on white with no colour, and the composition is centred and vertical.

Eagle Wing Feather Wolf Bear

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tide has been out three days, and the pole is still standing where the sea left it. You wade out at dusk with the salvage lamp swinging from your belt and count the faces top down, the way your grandmother counted stitches. The eagle first, wings flung wide over the bay. Then the long-eared face, two bears, a wolf with its jaw open, and last, near the waterline, a face worn almost smooth.

Keep reading

Sorin says the pole was bolted to a trawler as a joke, and that the paint came from some tourist before the flood. You do not argue. Under the scrapes the grain is cedar, close and red, the kind nobody has planted in a century. You run your thumb along the eagle's feathers, scallops cut so fine they catch the lamp like scales, and wonder who had the patience to carve them with shell and stone.

The crew wants it sawn for timber. The council wants it on the new quay, where visitors pay a coin to touch the glass. You tell them you will take the eagle alone and they can have the rest. At dawn you rig the winch, and the top section comes free of the stack with a groan like a hull settling, its wings still spread against the grey sky.

On the quay the eagle faces the water. Children climb the plinth and ask what it means. You say you do not know, which is true, and that the carver probably did not know either, not the way they want. Perhaps the bird was only meant to watch the sea and call the others home. Behind you the tide turns, and the bay fills slowly over the place where the rest still stands.