Full back tattoo in traditional style showing a bald eagle over a red, white and blue flag, with a snake and grey skulls below, on a man photographed from behind.

Eagle, flag and skulls across a back

Traditional · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large back piece shows a bald eagle with spread wings and a white head, perched above a snake and a cluster of grey skulls. The eagle and skulls are shaded with smooth tones and bold outlines, set against a background of stars and red stripes in an American flag design. Red, blue, brown, orange, white and grey ink are all present, and the composition fills the entire back from shoulder to waistband.

Traditional Back Eagle American flag Star Stripe Snake Skull

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The herald Maud Tallow had sewn the banner three winters before the eagle came down from the cliffs of Sarrow, and by harvest it was the only thing the garrison trusted. Stripes of madder red ran down the cloth like rain on glass, and the stars in the blue corner were cut from the coats of drowned sailors, a fact nobody mentioned at table.

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The snake came up from the cellars of the old mint, where the king's bankers had kept their ledgers. It had swallowed three clerks and grown fat on their columns of figures. Eamon Vell, captain of the watch, carried the clerks' skulls up to the gatehouse in a sack as proof, and he set them in a row on the step so the council could count them. The eagle watched from the banner pole with its white head turned, and nobody could say whether it had come to guard the gate or to pick it clean.

On the ninth night the snake reared up the flagpole. Maud climbed after it with a lantern and a pair of shears, and found the eagle's talons already locked around its throat. The bird was not fighting. It was waiting for her to hold the light steady.

By dawn the council had voted to bury the skulls beneath the flagstones, and the eagle had returned to its perch with its orange feet bright as new coins. The stars in the corner still glistened with dew, and the banner rippled over Sarrow with the sound of a ledger being closed at last.