Black and grey realism eagle head tattooed on the back of a hand, with the word SOUL in block lettering across the knuckles and fingers.

Eagle portrait on the back of a hand

Realism · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded eagle head with a detailed eye and feathered neck covers the back of a hand, with the word SOUL in bold blackletter-style capitals across the knuckles and fingers. The linework is fine and the grey shading gives the bird a realistic, three-dimensional look. A gold wristwatch sits on the wrist against a warm, dimly lit background.

Realism Lettering Hand Eagle Lettering Watch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Grey Aldous the clockmaker had promised the gulls he would mend the tide, and by the third spring of his debt the gulls were the only creditors left who would still speak to him. He sat in the back room above the chandlery with a gold watch face-down on the bench, its hands stopped at a quarter past nine, because a man who has sold his hours to the harbour does not like to watch them go.

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The eagle came in off the Skerries on a wet November evening, when the lamps were lit along Quay Street and the bell at St Brannoc had gone quiet. It had one eye a little brighter than the other, and it set a feather on the bench beside the watch and said nothing. Aldous understood that it had come for a soul, that the soul was his own, and that the price had been written inside the watch case in a hand he did not recognise. The word on it was SOUL, pressed in heavy black letters, as if the metal had been struck by a blacksmith rather than engraved by a clerk.

He pleaded, as men do, and the eagle waited, its feathers lifting in the draught from the door. In the end he gave it the only thing he had not yet sold, which was the knowing of how the tide bell was tuned. The eagle took the watch in its talons, wound it once with a click like a closing gate, and flew out over the harbour wall.

Next morning the bell rang true for the first time in a generation. The fishermen who heard it came home safe on the flood, and nobody in Quay Street asked where the eagle had gone, or where Aldous had gone either, though his lamp was lit in the back room for a long while after the rest of the town was asleep.