Traditional style tattoo of a straight razor with a striped colour handle, beside a black and grey eagle, on a limb.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Straight razor and eagle on a limb

Traditional · Other · Mixed · Photo

A straight razor with an open blade and a striped, ornamented handle in orange, teal, green and cream, with black outlining. Beside it sits a black and grey eagle with a partly visible banner at the bottom. The shading on the blade is smooth, and the colour is bold against the pale skin.

Traditional Other Eagle Banner Stripe Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Pardoe never let anyone shave at the sink in Room Four, so when the new lodger came down to breakfast with a patchy jaw on the third morning, she sent me up the back stairs with the tin of shaving soap and her dead husband's razor wrapped in a tea towel. 'Ivor would have wanted it used,' she said, 'not sat in a drawer going rusty like the rest of this house.'

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The razor had a handle of orange bone, striped like the sand bands on the cliffs at Gullhaven, with teal and green and a cream zigzag I used to trace with my thumb when I was small and nobody was looking. Ivor kept it open on the windowsill of the front parlour. He used to say the blade was the only honest thing on the seafront, because it told you exactly what it was going to do.

The lodger was a quiet man called Tobias who had come down on the train with one case and a ticket for the week. He sat very still while I stropped the blade on the leather strap, long strokes away from the edge, the way Ivor had taught me. When I laid the steel against his cheek he closed his eyes, and I felt, absurdly, that I was holding something older than either of us.

I finished the job and wiped the blade clean on the tea towel. When he thanked me, I told him the razor had been Ivor's. He nodded slowly, looked at the handle a while, and said his own grandfather had carried one exactly like it through a war. Then he paid for the week in advance and left the razor on the sideboard where I'd put it, folded back into its case, and I understood it had never been mine to give away.