Shirtless torso with black script lettering across the chest, an eagle on the upper chest and neck, and tribal-style blackwork on the shoulder and upper arm.

Script lettering, eagle and tribal chest and arm tattoos

Lettering · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A shirtless torso, cropped below the neck and above the waist, shows a large area of black script lettering across the chest, with an eagle with spread wings above it on the upper chest. Tribal-style patterns and ornamental floral motifs cover the shoulder, upper arm and the opposite side of the chest. The tattoos are solid black ink with grey shading, and the image is well lit and sharp.

Lettering Blackwork Chest Upper arm Shoulder Script Lettering Eagle Tribal pattern Floral Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Maren had cut the same line into the lychgate three times before the vicar admitted he could not read it. The letters ran down the timber on a slant, crowded close, each one leaning on the next as if trying to keep warm. "It's meant to be read in a hurry," she told him, brushing sawdust from her eyebrows. "Nobody reads a gate slowly."

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The eagle had come to the wood the winter the old oak split in the gale. It sat on the broken trunk for days, wings half open, watching the lane where the carrier's cart rattled past with the post. Maren took it as a sign, the way she took most things, with a chisel in one hand. She began cutting small feathers into the margins of her letters so the words would have something to fly from.

In February the carrier's boy went through the ice on the mere, and the satchel he had been carrying was never found. Two envelopes survived in the reeds, their ink run to grey, and nobody could say which house either one was for. Maren walked the lane with the bag over her shoulder, reading the slanted names aloud to the hedges. At the last gate the eagle dropped from the oak, lifted a corner of the envelope in its talons, and set it down on the step of the cottage whose door bore the same crowded hand.

She never learned what the letter said, and the old woman who opened the door never told her. The vicar decided the lychgate was fine as it was. Maren kept the chisel in her apron pocket and went back to cutting words that could be read in a hurry, with feathers beside every one.