Eagle head in grey shading with a starred wing and red striped flag design on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Eagle and flag design on the ribs

Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A grey-shaded eagle head in profile sits on the side of the torso, with its wing filled by dark star shapes and textured panels. Below the wing, three red stripes curve downward, echoing a flag motif. The skin is lit by daylight against a pale blue sky, with denim jeans visible at the bottom edge of the frame.

Ribs Eagle Star Stripe Flag Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You learn the bird by its shadow before you see it, the way the fishing boats learn it: a dark shape sliding over the slipway at the hour the nets come up. Old Ruari says it has been coming to the harbour at Sgeir Bheag since the winter the ferry stopped running, and that it has never once taken a gull's catch, only its own.

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The paint is the trouble. Every spring you mix the red for the stern of the Morag, three stripes curving down from the wheelhouse the way the flag hangs from the kirk on feast days, and every spring Ruari tells you the red is wrong, too much rust, not enough blood. You paint it anyway. He taught you lettering in the first place, and he always said lettering was only patience with a brush held still.

In April the eagle comes down on the bollard beside you while you are cutting the last stripe. It turns its head so one pale eye can read you, then looks past you at the wheelhouse, where you have spent three weeks dabbing navy tins of leftover paint into a sky of little stars. Ruari's hands stop on the tin. "Put the brush down," he says, and you do. The bird lifts off slow and heavy, and where its feet pressed the wet red on the bollard there are three neat marks, like it has signed for the boat.

Ruari studies the marks a long time. "Well," he says at last. "Now she's properly dressed." So you climb the ladder and paint the last star on the stern, not quite straight, because that is how the good ones land.