Traditional style tattoo of an ornamental eagle in flight with red and black feathers, placed on the upper back over the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental eagle in flight on a shoulder blade

Traditional · Back · Mixed · Photo

A bird of prey, resembling an eagle, is shown in flight with its wings spread and talons extended. The linework is bold and black, with patterned feathers, decorative bands on the head and wing, and solid red fills across the lower wing. The eagle sits diagonally across the upper back, with the shoulder blade and a white top visible at the edges.

Traditional Neo-trad Back Eagle Feather Wing Talon

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The eagle came down over the river the night the bridge lamps failed, and it carried a bread knife in its talons because the baker's girl had asked it to bring something sharp for the rope. Nobody in Sallow Quay thought much of eagles. They were for church roofs and coats of arms, not for hauling. But the girl had fed it scraps on the wharf all winter, and a bird that has been fed remembers.

Keep reading

The rope was for the lighterman's son, who had gone under the ice at the weir and was still under it, or so the men said, though the women had been burning candles in the chapel since noon. The eagle beat its way up the dark face of the warehouses, its wings banded with the old patterns the sailmakers stitched on, and its red underwings caught the glow of a fire somebody had lit on the quay. It had no business being so bright in a city of smoke.

It did not cut the rope. It cut the ice. Talons first, it broke a hole through the grey skin of the weir where the water ran fast, and held the knife in its feet while the boy's coat floated up through the black. Then it dropped the knife on the stones at the girl's feet, as if returning something borrowed.

By morning the bells were ringing and the eagle was gone from the roofs. The lighterman's son sat on the quay with a cough and a bruised cheek. The girl kept the knife. Some nights, when the lamps fail, she says she can still see red feathers drifting under the bridge, and her father tells her to go to bed.