Solid black eagle tattoo with spread wings across the upper chest, shown on a woman wearing a green checked shirt over a grey vest top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Spread-winged eagle across the upper chest

Blackwork · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A bold black eagle with outstretched wings and a front-facing head sits across the upper chest, just below the collarbones. The design uses solid black fills and sharp feather lines, with a stylised, heraldic look. The image is in colour, but the only ink is black against the skin, and the green checked shirt and grey top sit around it.

Blackwork Chest Eagle Wing Bird Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom,

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The eagle came up well this year, frost and all. You'll remember Grandad always said a bird wants its wings level before anything else, so I started at the tips and worked inward, the way he showed us the summer you broke the good shears. The head took most of the morning. He never let anyone touch the beak until the wings were right, and I think he was right about that too.

Mr Ashdown's solicitor came on Tuesday with a tape measure and a face like wet paper. He said the garden would fetch more as lawn. I told him the yew was not for sale, and he looked at the hedge the way you look at a dog you're not sure about. He wrote something down anyway.

I did the last cut on Thursday, when the light went flat over the kitchen garden. The wings ran the full width of the south wall, sharp at every feather edge, like the badge on the cap he kept in a biscuit tin. I stood back on the gravel and it looked as though it might lift off the brick and take the whole lawn with it.

I left one clipping on the path, a single green feather, and I didn't sweep it up. Let Ashdown's man find it. You can have the tin when you're home. Love, Ruth.