Traditional style hawk tattoo in flight with red feather detailing on the outer thigh, with denim shorts visible above.

Hawk in flight on a thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A hawk with spread wings and clawed talons is shown in mid-flight, facing right with an open beak. The linework is bold and dark, with scale-like feather patterns in brown, grey and red. The bird sits on the outer thigh against pale skin, with denim shorts at the top edge of the frame.

Traditional Thigh Bird Wing Talon Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hawk came down off Carrick Edge the week the mill closed, and nobody in Thornely thought much of it until the Pennock boy lost his kite on the church spire. The kite was red paper on cane, and it hung there in the wind for three days like a bad tooth. Old Ada Sowerby said the hawk had come for it, and the men laughed at her in the Crown.

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It was a big bird, brown and grey, with rows of red banding across its breast as if someone had pressed fish scales into every feather. It flew over the high street at the height of the chimneys, wings spread flat, and it never once looked down at the bakery or the carts or the schoolyard. It looked at the spire. Each morning it circled the kite, and each evening it went back to the Edge.

On the fourth morning Ada walked up the hill with a loaf under her arm and her good coat buttoned wrong. She sat on the wall by the lychgate and waited. When the hawk came round, she held up the bread and told it, plainly, that the boy was called Tom, that his father had come back from Dunkirk and did not sleep, and that a kite was no use to anyone stuck in a steeple.

The hawk loosed the string with one talon, neat as a seamstress, and the red paper drifted down into Ada's lap. She folded it small. Tom had it back by teatime, and the hawk was never seen over Thornely again, though Ada left a loaf on that wall every Thursday until she died, and the sparrows would not touch it.