Woman in a blue dress with traditional tattoos on her thigh, including an eagle over a skull, and colourful designs on her lower leg and upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Eagle and skull on a thigh, traditional legs

Traditional · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

The photo shows the legs and upper arms of a woman in a blue skater dress, photographed from behind and below, with her head cropped out of frame. A bold black eagle clutching a skull sits on the thigh, with a seahorse on the upper arm and further colourful designs down the lower leg, including a crystal-like shape and a flame. The linework is heavy and outlined, with solid fills in red, yellow, green and blue set against the white background.

Traditional Thigh Calf Upper arm Eagle Skull Seahorse Flame Crystal Flower

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pull your stools in close, the lot of you, and mind the draught under the door. Snow like this always brings the old tales out of hiding, and this one is older than the inn itself. Up on the Scarrow ridge, where the sheep froze standing in the winter of the great drifts, there lived an eagle called Harrow, with feathers the colour of wet slate and a temper to match.

Keep reading

One February a shepherd's boy went missing in the white. The village found him three days later on the north ledge, sitting with his back against the rock and his hands folded in his lap as if he were waiting for a bus. Nobody could say how he had got there. The women swore Harrow had found him first and kept watch over him, wings spread like a blanket against the wind. When the men came up with ropes, the bird rose screaming and took the old skull that lay in the scree below, the skull of a monk who had fallen there a hundred years before, and carried it off over the frozen tarn.

The men cursed it and fired their guns and missed, because a bird that size never flies where you aim it. For a week Harrow circled the church tower with that skull in its talons, and every dusk the bell rang by itself. Then the thaw came, and the skull was found on the vicarage step, polished smooth, with a length of blue wool knotted through the eye sockets.

So when the snow comes down thick as this, and you hear something scraping at the shutters, don't go to open them. It's only Harrow, come to see whether we've kept our side of the bargain. I never did learn what the bargain was. Pass me that cup, and let the fire do the rest.