Black and grey realism tattoo of a soaring hawk with spread wings, placed on the upper chest near the collarbone.

Soaring hawk on the upper chest

Realism · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A detailed black and grey tattoo of a bird of prey with its wings fully spread, shown in a front-on flying pose. The feathers are rendered with fine shading and stippled texture, giving the wings and tail depth and a lifelike quality. The bird is centred on pale skin with dark hair visible at the top of the frame, and there is no colour ink.

Realism Chest Wing Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the lamp, it has a temper like everything else on this field. Forty summers I have walked behind these caravans, and I will tell you about the hawk that came down out of the Cornish mist the year the Mardle Brothers lost their dancing bear to a farmer in a waistcoat.

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Old Jem Varley kept a goshawk in the back of his wagon, a bird with a wing that had been crushed in a gate and was never going to fly again, or so the vet in Penzance told him. Jem nursed it on raw mince and sang it lullabies in the tongue of his grandmother. Every evening he propped the flap open so it could stand on the sill and look out over the stubble toward the sea, and every evening it turned its head away from him, as if he were the one who had clipped its wings.

Then came the night the fair caught fire, a stupid spark from the pie stall, and the whole field lit up like a lantern. Jem ran into the smoke for the horses. When he came out, coughing, his sleeve smouldering, the sill was empty. Above the cliffs the sky was full of wings spread wide and perfectly still, riding the hot air as though they had been waiting all their lives to be asked.

The bird circled three times over the blaze, then went north over the headland and was never seen again. Jem swore it was the wing that healed, not the bird that left. He never did say which of them he believed, and he kept the one grey feather it dropped on the sill, which is more than any of us got from him. Now hush, the lamp is going out, and the next pie is on me.