Back view of a woman in a shop aisle with a black and grey eagle tattoo on her upper back and the words MARRIED WITH 22 KIDS in lettering across her lower back.

Eagle and lettering on a lower back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a woman seen from behind, with a black and grey eagle with spread wings across her upper back and a banner of block capitals reading MARRIED WITH 22 KIDS on her lower back. The linework is bold with grey shading, and the lettering sits within decorative scrolled borders. The background is a blurred shop aisle with shelving, and the subject's face is not visible.

Lettering Back Eagle Wing Lettering Banner Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer the range, the lot of you, for the wind is up over Scarrow Top and it will want to hear this. My grandfather told it me the winter the lambing failed, and he swore on his mother's Bible that the eagle was real, and that it was the one thing on the Hallam farm that never once asked for wages.

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The eagle came down the fell in the first hard snow of 1887, a brown bird with its wings spread wide as a barn door, and it settled on the gatepost where old Hallam kept his ledger of debts. Hallam had been a sign-writer in Keswick before the mines shut, and he still carried a tin of gold leaf and a brush worn down to three hairs. Being an honest man, he painted a scroll across the bird's shoulders in plain block capitals, so the valley would know whose it was, and the bird let him, which tells you something about the bird.

After that, nobody in the dale could tell a lie at the gate. Whoever stood before that eagle and read the scroll aloud had to give a true count of their coal, their potatoes and their unpaid rent, and the bird would tilt its head and close one eye if they strayed. Hallam's ledger came out square that winter, which is more than the parson's did.

In March the thaw came off the fell, and the eagle lifted from the post with the scroll still across its breast. It circled the farm once, slow and dark against the sky, and then it went back up over Scarrow Top, and Hallam never painted another word. Mind your tongue at gates, my lads, for you never know whose eye is watching from the snow.