Traditional colour tattoo of an eagle with a red rose and green leaves across a person's upper back.

Eagle and rose on upper back

Traditional · Back · Colour · Photo

A bare upper back shows a large eagle in flight, its wings spread and head turned to the right, with a yellow hooked beak. Below it sits a red rose with purple shading, yellow highlights and green leaves, with small purple buds to the lower left. Bold black outlines and solid colour fills, with blue, tan and red in the feathers, give the piece a classic American traditional look.

Traditional Back Eagle Bird Rose Leaves Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The eagle comes down over the Blackwater at low tide, folding its wings the way the old salvage manuals promised, and you are the only one aboard the Halcyon Mare who still knows how to read its hooked yellow beak. Three clicks means a hull. Two means a fridge, and Dabney swears at it.

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You clip the bird to the tether and climb down the ladder to the wet deck. Dabney is already crouched over the sounding line, breath smoking in the grey light, muttering that nobody has sent a proper bird out this far since the drowned years. Past the sea wall the water lies flat as a plate, and somewhere beneath it a glasshouse once held a rose garden. The kite's lens has found a tin box wedged in silt, sealed with red wax.

Inside the tin there is no treasure, only a rose cutting pressed between two sheets of waxed paper and a folded note in a hand that slants like rain. You read it aloud because Dabney cannot. It says the rose will outlive the glasshouse if somebody keeps it cool and out of the wind, and that the eagle was meant to carry it north to the terraces where the last gardeners wait. Dabney laughs until he coughs and says the bird was never built for anything but a camera.

You put the tin inside your coat, close to the warm side, and tell the kite to fly north. It lifts off the mud with a sound like tearing silk, climbing over the flooded marsh with its blue-grey wings spread, and the yellow beak clicks once, then again, as if it remembers the route. You have never been north. At the top of the sea wall you open the tin, and the rose is still red, which you did not expect. You hold it up to the wind so the bird can see it too.