Black and grey drawing of an eagle with spread wings holding a Live to Ride banner, with a blank banner below, in a traditional style.

Eagle with Live to Ride banner

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed drawing of an eagle with spread wings and its head turned to the right, gripping a scroll banner that reads LIVE TO RIDE above a smaller RIDE TO LIVE banner. A blank ribbon curls across the lower left beneath the wings. The work uses fine stippled and hatched shading in black and grey on a plain white background, with no colour.

Traditional Eagle Wing Banner Ribbon Feather Talon Lettering

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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

Dessie Marsh had been painting the same two lines on the petrol tanks of every bike he sold since the spring of 1956, and he had stopped reading them years ago. Live to ride, ride to live. He had copied the lettering from a sketch on the back of a Brylcreem tin, wings and all, and the lads from the Cross garage liked it well enough. Beyond the bridge the gasworks hummed through the night, and nobody in Hatherleigh asked what a man was riding towards.

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On a wet Thursday in October a stranger wheeled a BSA into the yard with its front mudguard bent like a broken wing. He wanted a straight bar and a bit of paint, nothing fancy, and he said he would pay in cash. Dessie noticed that the rider's gloves were patched with a different leather on each finger and that he kept glancing down the lane. Dessie didn't ask. He hammered the guard true while rain drummed on the corrugated roof and the wireless murmured the football results.

When the man came back at dusk, he left a folded strip of card on the bench, blank on one side, and asked Dessie to letter it with whatever name the town would remember him by. Dessie picked up his brush, then set it down again. Some things you didn't paint on another man's say so. He tucked the blank strip into the drawer with the spare plugs and stood in the doorway until the red tail lamp had gone past the mill and out of sight.