Traditional style tattoo on a forearm showing a shaded grey eagle within a rope-style border, with a hand above it holding a red and orange flame.

Eagle, hand and flame on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows an eagle with spread feathers inside a circular rope-like border, with a shaded grey hand rising above it and a stylised red and orange flame curling from its fingers. The eagle and hand are rendered in black and grey shading with bold outlines, while yellow and orange accents appear on the eagle's head and wings and the flame. The design fills the forearm in a central, vertically oriented composition against a plain skin background.

Traditional Forearm Eagle Hand Flame Rope Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell had coiled the guy rope three times before the wind dropped enough for Mr Okonedo to light the torch. Behind the caravans the Ferris wheel stood still, its cars swaying like bottles on a shelf, and the eagle on its perch by the generator had not moved since dusk. Her uncle called the bird Cassius. Nobody had ever asked him why.

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The trick was never the fire. Okonedo had taken flame in his bare hand at every fair from Lowestoft to Yarmouth for twenty years, and the crowds gasped at the smoke curling from his fingers. The real act happened inside the ring of rope Nell had strung between two iron posts. Cassius would open his wings there, wide enough to brush the canvas, and watch the man's hand the way a bailiff watches a cash box. As long as the bird stayed in the rope, the fire stayed in the hand.

Tonight the flame guttered early. Okonedo's fingers shook, and Nell saw the cut in the rope where the knot had frayed through in the afternoon. She had no time to find the marlinspike. She tied a sheet bend with her teeth and her numb fingers, and the rope held just as the torch flared again.

Cassius lifted from the perch and drifted over the crowd, low enough that a boy in a flat cap ducked. He came back down on Okonedo's wrist, folded his wings, and stepped carefully into the ring. The fire rose from the man's palm in one red thread, thinned to nothing, and went out. Nell wound up the spare rope while the last cars of the wheel came groaning down, and Cassius tucked his head beneath his wing as if the night had finally been his to keep.