Colour traditional tattoo of a hawk with a pearl necklace and red medallion, perched on a black leather glove, on a calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hawk perched on a glove, traditional style

Traditional · Calf · Colour · Photo

A hawk with brown and red plumage and a red eye stands on a black glove with orange cord detailing and a chain hanging from the cuff. A string of pearls and a red jewelled medallion sit around the bird's neck. Bold black outlines, solid fills and layered shading are used throughout, set against healthy skin with a blurred brick and metal background.

Traditional Calf Glove Pearl Necklace Medallion Chain Cord

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hawk came aboard at Valparaíso in a crate with a brass plate that said only MRS HOLLIS, PRIVATE, and it took a piece of my thumb before the second bell. I kept her in a cage beside the galley stove, where the heat kept her feathers loose and her temper short. Captain Dunmore wanted her fed on quail, which we did not carry, so I fed her scraps of salt beef and listened to her shift on the perch all night like a clock somebody had forgotten to wind.

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The glove belonged to the widow who had paid for the passage, a woman with pearls at her throat and a red stone medallion the size of a shilling. Every morning at six she came down to the galley to whistle the bird onto her wrist. The hawk knew her hand better than mine, though it was my kettle she wanted. The cord on the glove was stiff with tallow, and she would lay it flat on the table and say, 'Tell me what you can smell, Mr Okafor.' I never knew what she meant, and she never explained.

On the thirtieth night the swell came up off the Horn and the hatch banged open. The hawk was gone before anyone found the latch undone. We searched the rigging by lantern until Mrs Hollis came down the ladder with her glove bare and her pearls swinging, and she stood in the scullery doorway and simply waited. Something dropped out of the dark and landed on the cuff with a clatter of talons, and the chain at the wrist swung once and settled.

She did not thank me. She fed the bird a strip of my salt beef, unhooked the medallion from her collar, and tied it round the hawk's leg with a length of red thread. 'Now she knows the way home,' she said, and she went back up on deck with the bird riding her arm into the grey light, both of them facing east towards a coast neither of us would see.