Black and grey sketchy-style bird with spread wings tattooed across a man's upper back and shoulder blade, with typewriter lettering on the upper arm.

Sketchy bird in flight across upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large bird, likely an eagle or hawk, with its wings spread wide, is tattooed across the upper back and reaches toward the shoulder. The bird is built from loose, heavy brushstroke shading and fine stray lines in black and grey, with feathers suggested rather than fully rendered. A line of small typewriter-style lettering runs along the upper arm, partly cropped by the frame.

Back Shoulder Upper arm Bird Eagle Wing Lettering Text

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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

Mind the kettle, and sit where the lamp can reach you. You've come up from the river at this hour, so you'll want the story of the grey hawk that flew over Salford the night the power went out. Everyone in the terraces saw it. Nobody agreed on its colour, because it moved like smoke when it turned under the sodium lights, and when it dropped past the chimneys the pigeons didn't even scatter.

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Its keeper was Maud Erskine, who ran the night post from a cold room above the tram depot. Every letter that came in after ten passed through her hands, and she had one rule: nothing left the building unsigned. One February a boy brought her an envelope with no stamp and no address, only a line typed in faded ink: the whole land is waiting. She didn't know who had sent it. She only knew it had to go somewhere high.

So she climbed to the leads at midnight, wrapped in her father's coat, and whistled the way her grandfather had taught her. The hawk came down out of the cloud like a torn page. Its wings opened wider than the depot roof, and its talons closed on the envelope without a sound. It lifted over the canal, over the gasworks, over the sleeping mills, and for a moment every window in the city held a little light.

Next morning the envelope lay on her doorstep, empty but for one long grey feather and a second line in the same faded ink: delivered, and the whole land heard. Maud kept the feather on the sill above the sink. Some nights, if you sit still enough, you can hear the wind come round the chimneys looking for her.