Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a geometric eagle head with a dotted circle, on the forearm.

Geometric eagle head on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows an eagle head in profile, built from angular facets with a single eye and hooked beak. The facets are outlined in fine black linework, with stippled dotwork shading that deepens towards the lower half of the head. A dotted circle and dotted guide lines surround the design on pale skin against a dark, out-of-focus background.

Geometric Dotwork Forearm Eagle Dotted circle Geometric shape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down by the bollard where I can see your faces, the lot of you. No, Tommy, the mooring rope is not a swing. You know the eagle carved over the door of the old Ropewalk? Mrs Pascoe's grandfather swore it came in off the sea the winter the Gannet went down, with no feathers left on it, only edges, sharp as the cut glass in the chandler's window. Every bird carved since has been copied from that one, and none of them got the eye right.

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The eagle would not land for anybody. It flew a wide ring over the bay on a string of little dark stars, and each time a boat passed the harbour mouth it pricked a dot and tucked the boat inside the circle. Nobody ever counted the dots. Mrs Pascoe's grandfather did, the autumn he was thirteen and sick of being sent out before light. He sat on the sea wall with a slate and a stub of chalk and tallied every hull that came home until his fingers went numb, and the eagle came down out of the cloud and perched on the wall beside him, close enough to touch.

'What's your count, boy?' it asked, in the voice of the gulls. He said forty-one. The eagle tilted its angled head and said that was one short. The Gannet was still out past the Mare Rock, and he had not wanted to add her in, so he had left her off. The eagle said nothing more. It only lifted into the dusk and went round the bay once, slow, and the boy watched the ring of stars close up tight around the empty place where her dot should have gone.

The Gannet came in on the flood at first light with her mainsail torn to ribbons and every man aboard alive. The boy went down to the wall with his slate, and he found that the chalk tally had washed off in the night, every mark of it. All that was left was a single dot in the corner, where he had pressed too hard. Now off you go, the tide's turning and your mothers will be calling.