Realistic colour tattoo of a smiling man's portrait on an eagle wrapped in the American flag, perched on a branch, on the skin of the upper body.

Portrait and eagle in flag tattoo

Realism · Other · Mixed · Photo

A realistic portrait of a smiling man with short dark hair forms the head of an eagle whose body is wrapped in a rippled American flag. The eagle's feathers are shaded in brown and grey, and the flag shows red and white stripes and blue with white stars. The design rests on a gnarled branch across the lower half, set against pale skin.

Realism Other Portrait Man Eagle American flag Branch Star Stripe

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find the eagle at the cattle grid on the Sayer's Wells road, just after the sun clears the ridge. Its left wing is folded wrong, and a torn length of bunting has wound itself round its body, the red stripes gone pale and the blue stars bleached to the colour of dishwater. Somebody's fly-tipped trailer has been dragged along the verge all night, and the flag must have come off it. You kneel in the grit with your hat in your hand, and the bird watches you with one eye, not frightened, just patient, as if it has been waiting for a lift for a long time.

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Your father drove this road for thirty years in a tow truck with a cracked windscreen. He used to say the desert keeps what it finds and gives back only what it cannot digest. You wrap the bird in your work jacket and lay it across the passenger seat, and the flag slides off onto the dash in a soft heap, stars facing up.

At the clinic in Harlow Flats the vet, a woman who smells of antiseptic and cold coffee, says the wing will mend but the bird will never fly far again. She asks what you want done with it. You say nothing, and you mean it, and that is how you end up driving back out past the grid with a dead mesquite branch in the truck bed and the bunting folded on your knee.

You wedge the branch into the sand where the road bends, lash the flag to it with baling twine, and stand back. The wind takes the stars first, then the stripes, until the whole thing is a small bright argument against the dust. You leave it there. Tomorrow someone will stop, or nobody will, and either way the road will have a landmark it did not have before.