Black and grey realism tattoo of a bald eagle with spread wings gripping a sword, on the upper arm.

Eagle gripping a sword on an upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A bald eagle with wings spread gripes the hilt of a sword that points downward. The feathers and head are rendered in fine black and grey shading with soft highlights, and a loose reddish wash sits behind the bird. The design fills the upper arm, with the eagle's wing tips reaching toward the edge of the frame.

Realism Upper arm Eagle Bird Wing Sword

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sword had been driven into the shingle above the tideline for as long as anyone on Carrow could remember, point down, hilt bare to the weather. Nobody would pull it. Old Hamish Dunn said his grandfather had tried with two horses and a chain, and the chain had snapped like cotton. The children dared each other to touch the cross of the hilt, and the gulls used it as a perch.

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The eagle came in the spring Ailsa Reid stopped speaking to her brother. She found it on the shingle with one wing folded wrong, its talons closed around the hilt as if it had been holding on all night against a wind that had since died. She could have called the ferryman. Instead she sat on an upturned creel and waited, and the bird watched her with a yellow eye and did not let go.

It mended slowly on a diet of mackerel she left in a tin bucket. Each morning the grip was still there, and each morning she thought about her brother on the mainland, who had sold their father's boat without asking. One afternoon in June the eagle lifted its good wing, testing the air, and the sword shifted in the stone with a sound like a bell struck once.

When the tide turned, the blade came free and the eagle went with it, dropping the iron into the shallows before climbing off the headland into the sun. Ailsa waded out and lifted the sword. The grip had worn two pale hollows where the talons had rested. She carried it up the beach, set it against the wall of her cottage, and wrote to her brother that the boat could have its price in rope.