Realism-style colour tattoo of a hawk in flight with spread wings and extended talons, placed across the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hawk in flight across upper back

Realism · Back · Colour · Photo

A hawk with spread wings and extended talons is shown in mid-flight, angled diagonally across the skin. The feathers are rendered with detailed brown, cream and black banding, with orange and rust tones on the chest and wing coverts. The bird fills most of the frame against a softly lit background of skin.

Realism Back Bird Wing Talon Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hawk had been roosting in the rafters of the Carrick Arms since the thaw should have come, and Nell Ferrier had stopped pretending she did not feed it. Each morning she set a strip of salt beef on the sill of the hayloft, and each morning the bird took it with the neat impatience of a clerk. Its rust chest was the colour of the brick ovens in the kitchen, and when it lifted its wings the cream bars beneath caught the lamplight like ruled paper.

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The letter had come up from Hexham on the Thursday, tied with tarred twine and smelling of tallow. Nell's brother was working the lead levels above Allendale, and the high road had been shut for nine days. Mr Harbottle, the carrier, swore no horse could make the pass and no man would try it. So Nell tied the letter to the hawk's leg with a length of red wool her mother had once used for darning, and she did not let herself think about it again until the bird was a speck above the fell.

It came back at dusk, talons out, landing on the yard wall as though the weather belonged to it. Tucked beneath one wing was a second paper, damp and folded small, in a hand that was not her brother's. Nell read it twice by the stable lantern. Then she laughed, because Tom had never once in his life written that he was coming home, and here he was, a mile off, in a shepherd's hut with a broken lamp, asking whether the hawk had eaten.

She went out to the wall with a fresh strip of beef and held it up in the cold. The hawk, which had crossed three miles of blind snow and back for her, took it from her fingers without a glance at the sky.