Large black and grey eagle with red flame accents tattooed across a person's upper and mid back, in a Japanese style.

Eagle with red flames across the back

Japanese · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large eagle with a hooked beak and an orange-brown eye spreads its wings across the whole back, with its head turned toward the left shoulder. The feathers are shaded in black and grey with fine layered detail, and red flame-like swirls wrap around the wings and body. The composition fills the back edge to edge, with the bird's wing tips reaching toward the shoulder blades and the tail feathers curling down toward the ribs.

Japanese Traditional Back Eagle Feather Flame Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gulls had gone quiet over Harrow Cove the night the eagle came down the chimney of the Sealight boarding house, and Mrs Pennock was the only one who did not scream. She had kept the place for thirty-one winters and had seen a drowned cat, two bank clerks and a upright piano come through that door, so a bird with a hooked beak and smoke lifting off its wings was a matter for the broom, not a fright.

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The eagle would not leave the back stairs. It sat on the newel post with its wings half open, and where the feathers lifted, red threads ran off them like fuses, licking at the banister without catching. Tomas, the lodger who mended nets on the quay, climbed up with a bucket of sand and stopped halfway. The bird had turned its head toward him, and its eye was the colour of weak tea held up to a lamp.

'It wants the lamp lit,' Mrs Pennock said. 'The old keeper's fire went out in March and nobody thought to light it again.' She took the lamp-room key from its hook and pressed it into his palm. Tomas carried it up the cliff path with the eagle riding ahead, its flames trailing over the wet gorse like a wick drawn across a table, until the sea below turned copper and the boats began to find their way home.

When he came down at dawn the bird was gone, and the banister was scorched in one long curl, exactly the shape of a feather. Mrs Pennock hung the key back on its hook and said nothing at all about the rent.