Black and grey dotwork tattoo of an eagle head and outstretched wings on skin, with stippled shading and fine engraved lines.

Eagle head and wings in dotwork

Dotwork · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows an eagle in profile, head turned to the right, with its wings spread up and back across the frame. The feathers are built from fine black outlines filled with dense stippled dots and short engraved hatching, which gives the wings and head their shaded, textured form. The image is in black and grey with no colour ink, and the subject fills most of the frame against plain skin.

Dotwork Eagle Bird Wing Feather Head

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 cook on the salt barque Marrow Lass kept a bone-handled knife and a tin of pepper, and nothing else he would not share. When the ice came down the Firth that winter, he fed the crew on barley and boiled gull, and he never once said where the gulls came from. Mara, the youngest boy, asked him about it on the seventh night, while the galley stove ticked and the lamp swung.

Keep reading

The cook said that in his grandmother's village there had been an eagle that sat on the church roof and watched the herring boats come home. It was the colour of wet slate, with feathers cut so fine you could count them, and its eye was ringed like a coin. Every boat that went out past the headland came back if the eagle turned its head to the sea. If it turned to the land, the boat was lost. Nobody had ever seen it turn to the land, but the old women kept salt on the sills all the same.

One morning in the cook's fifteenth spring, the eagle lifted off the roof with its great wings spread up and back, and it did not come down. The fishermen rowed out and found the water empty, and they say the feathers fell on the harbour like grey snow for a week after. Mara asked whether that was the end of it. The cook scraped the pot clean and set it to dry. Then he tapped the stove door twice with the knife and said the boat was going out in the morning, and that she would need her gloves.