Black and white photo of a man seen from behind, showing a large Japanese style back tattoo of an eagle, waves and clouds, with script lettering and tattoos on his upper arms and forearms.

Full back piece with eagle and waves

Japanese · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A man is photographed from behind with his hands raised to his head, showing a large back piece. The design includes a bird of prey with spread wings, layered wave and cloud forms, and a central banner with script lettering reading villain and virtue. The image is monochrome, with fine shading and detailed grey linework across the back and arms.

Japanese Lettering Back Upper arm Forearm Eagle Wave Cloud Script Banner Back piece

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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

The eagle came back to the walled garden the morning after the storm, as if it had been owed the cabbages. I was on my knees in the leeks when its shadow crossed the bed, and I did not look up, because my mother taught me that a thing you stare at will stare back.

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Old Tamsin Rowe from the harbour cottages said it was the same bird that carried off her cat in 1986, and that it had taken the wind's side in every quarrel since. I didn't believe her until I saw the bird settle on the rain butt, its hooked beak working at a fish the gulls had left. Waves rolled up the cliff behind it, cloud banked over the church tower, and somewhere a man was whistling a hymn with the wrong words.

I went to the potting shed for the shears. On the bench sat the seed tin my father had painted, its lid lettered in fancy curls: Villain and Virtue, the only two varieties he ever sold. Villain was a bean, black-podded and bitter. Virtue was a pea, sweet as sugar. He used to say the garden needed both, one to feed the bird and one to feed us, and that a gardener who could not tell them apart would be eaten by whichever he planted first.

When I stepped back out the eagle was gone, and the rain butt held only a grey feather and a single bean pod split open in the wet. I picked it up. It was the bitter kind. I planted it by the wall anyway, where the sea could reach it, and I wrote Virtue on the label for the next row, because somebody has to keep the kind ones honest.