Full back tattoo in traditional style showing an eagle, a coiled snake, a sailing ship on waves and red roses, placed on the back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Eagle, snake and ship across a full back

Traditional · Back · Colour · Photo

A man is photographed from behind, showing a large full-back tattoo. The central design is a sailing ship with a red flag on rolling waves, framed by a red and white eagle head, a green and pink snake, yellow lightning bolts and sunburst rays. Bold outlines and solid, saturated colour fill the design, with two red roses along the lower edge.

Traditional Back Eagle Snake Sailing ship Wave Lightning Sunburst Rose Cloud Rope

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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

Sit down and stop fidgeting with that net, because the sea was still making up its mind when the Mary Ellen came round Skerrow light that morning. Dunstan had the wheel and the wind had the rest of us. Lightning walked across the water as if it were hunting a dropped coin, the clouds piled up grey and green like bad mackerel, and somewhere behind it all the sun was trying to squeeze out through a seam.

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Then the eagle came. I swear it on my mother. A great red-headed thing dropped out of the squall and settled on our bowsprit as though it owned the boat, its wings spread wide over the bow. The rope we'd lost overboard the day before came whipping after it, coiled round the forestay like a snake that had decided to be useful. Dunstan shouted that it was only a gull. Nobody believed him, and nobody let go of the rail.

The rays broke through just as the bow lifted on the swell, gold spilling across the water and up the mast, and there was the red flag, bold as a sermon, pointing us home. We ran the channel with the sun at our backs. Afterwards the lads said the eagle had been a sign, and Dunstan said it was a bird with a taste for fish heads, and neither of them was ever entirely wrong.

Every Sunday since, Ruth Pell has left two red roses on the quay wall outside the chandlery, one for Dunstan and one for the gull, and she has never once said which of them she thinks came back.