Greyscale pencil sketch of a front-facing eagle head with narrowed, intense eyes and a hooked beak, drawn as a possible tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pencil sketch of a fierce eagle head

Black and grey · Flash

A front-facing eagle head drawn in graphite pencil, with a sharp hooked beak at the centre and bright, narrowed eyes framed by heavy dark shading. Feathers and whisker-like marks radiate outwards in loose, sketchy strokes that fade into the white background. The image is entirely black and grey on a plain white background, with the subject placed centrally.

Eagle Beak Eye Feather

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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 gilt eagle above the stage of the Mercury Ballroom had been painted with its eyes narrowed, as if it disapproved of the foxtrot, and Dorothy Price had never once turned her back on it during a set. She kept the place for Mr Harrow, who paid her in cash on Fridays and never climbed a ladder himself. Her knees were the reason she gave people, though Mr Harrow was not a man to climb anything.

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On the last Friday in October the band packed up early because of the rain, and Dorothy stayed behind to sweep. A dance card had slipped from behind the eagle's frame and landed face up on the boards, its edges furred with dust. Inside, in faded pencil, someone had written her mother's name, then a date in 1944, then the words hold the floor for me. Dorothy had not known the frame could be lifted. She had not known anyone else remembered that her mother had danced here the night before the troopships left.

She climbed the stepladder with the card in her apron pocket and a cloth in her hand. Up close the eagle smelled of size and old tobacco, and its painted eyes were chipped at the corners, so that from the floor it looked fiercer than it was. She wiped the varnish gently, the way you would wipe a child's face, and when she came down she left the stage lamp switched on.

On Saturday the room was full by eight. Dorothy stood at the cloakroom hatch with her hands folded and watched the eagle watch the dancers, the two of them keeping the same stern patience. When the last waltz began she put the card back where she had found it, and for the first time in thirty years she did not look up at the bird.