Eagle head in profile, tribal line design

Black and grey · Flash

A bold black line drawing of an eagle's head and upper neck, shown in profile facing left. The hooked beak, detailed eye and sweeping, pointed feather strokes are drawn with thick solid outlines and open white areas. The design is entirely black on white with no shading or colour.

Eagle Bird Feather Beak Profile

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are forty minutes into the eagle when Mr Dunning comes in from the yard smelling of linseed and tells you the council wants it finished by Saturday. The board is a sheet of hardboard propped on two trestles at the back of the sign works in Harrowby Cross, and the bird on it is meant to hang over the door of the new Co-operative hall, wings folded like a shut umbrella. You have drawn it in pencil three times already. Each time the feathers came out too soft, like a hen's, and Dunning said so.

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So tonight, with the shop empty and the wireless murmuring the shipping forecast in the corner, you stop being careful. You take the sable brush and the black lamp-tar Dunning uses for lettering and put the outline down in one hard pull from the brow to the hooked beak. The line goes thick where the bird is angry and thin where it is watching. The feathers you drag off the skull in sharp backward flicks, five, six, seven, each ending in a point like a struck match. Nobody taught you that. Your father used to carve rocking horses from ash and never once let a tail come out blunt.

By midnight the head is there, turned to the left as if it has seen something on the Leeds road. The white space inside the neck has the same jagged rhythm as the crest, so the whole thing looks less like a picture than a storm front moving across the board. Dunning comes down at six with his cup of tea, stands in front of it for a long time, and says nothing at all.

On Saturday, when the bird goes up over the door, he climbs the ladder himself to hammer the last nail, and at the bottom of the ladder he tells you the eye is wrong. You know it is not. From the pavement you can see it is looking straight down the high street at everyone who ever told you to draw it softer.