Colour tattoo of an eagle with spread wings formed from American flag stripes and white stars, with blue and red splatter, across the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flag eagle across the upper back

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A bird of prey with spread wings is built from red and white flag-style stripes, with white stars across the blue upper wing edges and a central eagle head. Soft edges, splatter and fading strokes give the wings a painterly, sprayed look rather than hard outlines. Red and blue ink dominate, with dark blue speckles falling below the stripes, and the design is centred on the upper back.

Back Eagle Flag Star Stripe Wing Splatter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The eagle came down to Marrow Creek the week after the Fourth, when the bunting was still hanging crooked on the feed store and nobody had got round to taking it down. Ada Pruitt saw it first from the back step of the paint shop, where she was scraping the last of the red out of a tin. It drank from the shallows with its wings half open, and the wings were striped like the banner over Main Street, red and white, with a spatter of blue along the edges where the paint had run.

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The men of the town took their shotguns down to the bank that evening. Walter Hobbs, who had lost two hens the spring before, said it was a thief and a foreigner besides, though nobody could say which country would send a bird like that. Ada said nothing. She had ground the blue herself from a jar of lapis her mother kept for a dress that was never sewn, and she knew the bird had not come for hens. It had come for the stars she had painted on the schoolhouse board the winter before, the ones nobody had paid her for.

When Walter raised his gun, the eagle lifted its wings and shook them, and the stars came loose from the feathers, small and white, drifting down over the water. Where they touched a man's sleeve they stayed. The blue speckles fell after them over the bridge and the fields, so that by morning the whole town had dots on its hands and the creek ran a little bluer than before.

Nobody has fired at the eagle since. Walter still has a white star on his cuff that will not wash out, and every Fourth the bird comes back to drink, and every year someone leaves a tin of red paint on the paint shop step, just in case.