Black and grey traditional eagle tattoo with swirling feathers covering the upper arm and elbow of a man in a striped vest.

Eagle tattoo on upper arm and elbow

Traditional · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo of an eagle's head and wings covers the upper arm and reaches toward the elbow. The linework is bold and the shading is soft, with feathers rendered in layered outlines and grey wash. The photo is taken at night on a street, with blurred lights in the background.

Traditional Upper arm Forearm Eagle Bird Feather Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer, the lamp's going and I'll not shout over it. The eagle? Everyone wants the eagle. Nobody wants the bit about the salt, but you'll get that too, because the salt is what the eagle was made to fly over.

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Back when the estuary had swallowed Ardwick and the tram lines ran out into grey water, the Wardens kept one roost left on the Hulme spire. They bred birds for carrying. Harrow was the last of the grey-winged ones, and his feathers were not feathers at all but layered tin, scored and oiled, so that when he banked over the flooded streets the light went off him in rows, like a ledger being turned. He carried paper in a tube on his leg. Ration tallies, mostly. Who was still breathing, who was not.

The Wardens told the people the names were going east to the dry hills. Harrow flew east every dawn and came back every dusk with the tube still full. Nobody asked why. Nobody wanted to hear that the messages had stopped moving years before, and that he had been carrying the same list round and round the drowned blocks, circling the lamp posts the way gulls circle a boat that has already gone down.

One wet morning a girl climbed the stairwell on Crown Street with her mother's shoes in a carrier bag and found him perched on the broken rail. She opened the tube. Her own name was the last line, in her mother's hand. She read the names aloud, the way you do over a grave. Harrow lifted off the rail, his wings going up like a shaken sheet of tin, and took her out over the water towards the hills, where the names were finally meant to go. I have never known if he reached them. I only know the list was in her hand when she went.