Traditional style tattoo of a swooping eagle in grey and orange with a red sun and star shapes on a forearm.

Eagle with red sun on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A large eagle swoops downward with its wings spread, its talons and head shown in orange and pale grey, set against a red sun with radiating red rays. Four-pointed sparkle shapes sit in the background on either side of the bird. The bird's feathers use bold black outlines with grey and orange shading, and the colour palette is limited to red, orange, grey and black on the skin.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bird comes out of the sunrise far too big for the open sea, folding its wings like a man folding a letter he has decided not to send. Bosun Pryce is already at the rail with his tea going cold. "Gannets don't hunt like that," he says. "That's a hawk's dive, and there's no land for a thousand miles."

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The sun lifts behind it, red as a lamp in a chandler's window, and the rays spread across the water like cut tin. You count the stars still hanging over the mainmast, four-pointed and fading one at a time. Pryce says the old navigators used them the same way, one bright point in each corner of the sky to hold the rest in place. You learnt that off a Mersey ferryman years ago, and you never once thought to check whether he was right.

The bird doesn't strike the water. It levels out a yard above the swell, talons open, and plucks a flying fish from the spray as neatly as a barmaid lifting a coin. Then it settles on the spanker boom and regards the two of you with an orange eye that has no interest in either. Pryce pays out on the wager, a shilling and a tot of Jamaica rum. You decline the rum and give the shilling to Cook for the bird's breakfast.

You write it in the log before the watch changes: 0614, eagle on the boom, wind south-west, no land in sight. When you look up, the bird has gone, riding the warm air straight into the red sun, and the last of the stars has gone out behind it.

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