Black and grey traditional tattoo of an eagle with a United States flag, an anchor and a banner reading U.S.N., on the upper arm.

Eagle, flag and anchor on an upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo shows a spread-winged eagle holding a banner that reads U.S.N. across an anchor, with a flag of stars and stripes rising behind the bird. The bold black outlines are paired with grey shading on the wings, flag and anchor, and the design sits centrally on the skin. The photograph is taken at a slight angle with a blurred object in the top left corner.

Traditional Upper arm Eagle Anchor Flag Star Stripe Banner Lettering

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

The gale had put the lamp out twice before dawn, so Mary Pell went down the cliff path at the turn of the tide to see what the sea had left. Among the wrack and the split lobster pots lay an eagle, grey as slate, one wing folded wrong. Its talons were locked round a small iron anchor, and a strip of canvas ran from its beak like a ribbon, the letters on it blurred by brine.

Keep reading

She knelt and read them slowly. U.S.N. Her father had never once spoken of a navy, only of the Ruth Ann, which went down off the Skerries in the year of the long frost and took three men with her. Mary had always thought the name a misspelling of something, a boat's name half-remembered. She tucked the bird inside her coat and carried it up the hill, past the stone wall where the gulls sat in rows like elders at a funeral.

Her father was at the lamp when she came in, cleaning the glass with a rag. He looked at the bird for a long time, then at the canvas. That's not from this coast, he said. That's from the far side of the water, where they fly a flag of stars over ships that never come home. He turned the anchor over in his palm, and on its shank was a year, and under the year a second anchor, smaller, the same as the one he had kept in the drawer for forty years.

They kept the lamp burning that night and until the sky went pale. At first light Mary opened the gallery door, and the eagle rose off the rail slowly, favouring its good wing, and turned once over the water. The canvas streamed out behind it, and for a moment the red and white of the cloth caught the sun before the bird bent south and was gone over the Skerries.