Back view of a person with a densely tattooed back and arms, featuring a large grey hexagon, a crested eagle and engraved-style vintage motifs in realism style.

Full back tattoo with hexagon and eagle crest

Realism · Back · Mixed · Photo

A person is photographed from behind with both hands raised to the head, showing an extensive tattoo covering the back, shoulders, upper arms, neck and hands. The linework is fine and shaded in black and grey, with engraved-style vintage imagery, a large hexagonal panel, a crested eagle and lettering across the upper back. A small area of red ink appears on the right shoulder blade, and the image is framed against a dark background beside a medical-style scan.

Realism Back Upper arm Hand Neck Hexagon Eagle Crest Lettering Engraving Hand Skyline Banknote Compass

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The copper plate had sat on the bench since Tuesday, and Mr Orme had not touched it once. "Finish the arch," he said, and went back to his tea. Ada bent over the burin with the lamp pulled close, cutting the small hexagonal window the Calder Bank had ordered for its new fifty-pound note, a chapel window that nobody in Leeds had ever seen. The lines had to be finer than hair. Any thicker and the notes would print grey, and the clerks at the bank would hold them up to the light and sniff for forgery.

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Across the yard the chimneys of the works smoked through the window glass, and she cut them into the margin too, three squat towers with the sky scratched behind them. The eagle came last. The bank's drawing showed it facing left, so she had to cut it in reverse, every feather backwards in the copper, so that the press would turn it the right way round. It was like writing with a mirror and trusting the mirror. Mr Orme said the trick was to stop thinking of it as a bird.

On the Friday she found the old cancelled plate in the drawer under the proofs. Its hexagon was the same, its towers the same, and tucked into the shadow beneath the arch were two letters cut so small she needed the glass to read them: A.P. Her father had engraved for the Calder Bank until the spring of 1903, when a boiler on the north side gave way and took three men with it. Nobody had ever told her he had signed anything.

She worked until the lamp guttered, then cut her own initials beneath his, in the same reversed hand, so they would print the right way round. In the morning she pulled the first proof. The eagle faced the correct direction, the chapel window glowed grey and exact, and in its shadow two small letters sat where they had always been meant to sit.