Colour realism tattoo of a griffin with an eagle head, white and grey wings and a golden lion body, set against a pale blue and pink cloud background on a limb.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Griffin with eagle head and wings on clouds

Realism · Other · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a griffin with an eagle's head and wings, a golden lion's body and a long feathered tail, with yellow talons gripping at the lower left. The shading is soft and detailed, with smooth gradients across the feathers and fur. The background is a sky of pale blue and pink clouds that fills most of the frame, and the subject sits diagonally across the image.

Realism Other Eagle Wing Lion Tail Talon Cloud Sky

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp man has already gone down the row by the time you reach the top of the tip, so you carry the bread tin up yourself, its lid knocking against your hip at every step. Below, the village is a handful of grey roofs with the chapel sitting in the middle like a dropped glove. Your brother said the banner would be in the loft. He was right about that, though he was wrong about the state of the roof.

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The banner comes out of the oilcloth in one stiff sheet. Someone painted it years ago for the lodge's Sunday march, a griffin with an eagle's head and a lion's body, rising off a bank of clouds. The pinks have gone the colour of old gums and the blue has bled into the weave, but the talons are still gold. Gwen used to say the griffin was the only creature the colliery ever admitted to owning. The men marched behind it to the Co-op on strike days and sang until the constables gave up.

The letter from the new company came on Tuesday. They want the lodge records, the lamp registers and anything else with the pit's name on it, and a van is coming Thursday. You fold the banner twice, then stop, because the wings are spread so wide that folding cuts the sky in half. So you carry it down unfolded, past the shut gate and the wheel that no longer turns, and you hang it across the front window of your own kitchen.

Afternoon light comes through the clouds and lands on the griffin's golden flank. For a minute the lion looks as if it is leaping over the terraces instead of the slag. You set the bread tin on the table and leave the lid off. Nobody is going to tell you that is a sensible thing to keep.