Greyscale realism design of three bald eagles, one large head study above and two in flight and perched below, set against soft clouds.

Three bald eagles in greyscale

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a large close-up of a bald eagle's head at the top, with a flying eagle across the centre and a second perched eagle in the lower right. The feathers and beaks are rendered with smooth airbrush-style shading and fine detail, with soft clouds and rocky ground behind them. The image uses only black and grey tones, with light areas on the white heads and darker tones on the wings.

Realism Eagle Wing Feather Cloud Flight Beak

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You hear the wire before you see the bird, a tick of steel as the gantry settles under a weight it should not be carrying at two in the morning. Below, the Wharf Road lamps have gone the colour of weak tea, and the river past the cranes is a sheet of black tin. Dev has gone down for the van keys and the flask, so you are alone on the crane deck with a bald eagle the size of a coat stand, hunched on the lip of the cab as if it had booked the spot.

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It turns its head slowly, first one way and then the other, the way a clerk checks a ticket. The white crown catches the glow of the signal lamp. Its eye is pale and steady, and you understand that it is not lost. Lost things look for a way down. This one is weighing the wind coming off the estuary and finding it acceptable.

You talk to it because talking is what you have. You tell it about the falconer above the bookmaker's in Pellow Street, who lost two birds last winter and has been pinning notices to lamp posts ever since. The eagle opens its wings, a long unhurried spreading that drags the cloud light across the steel, the primaries splayed like the fingers of a hand. Then it drops off the gantry edge and is gone over the rooftops towards the cloud bank, and the signal goes on blinking red for nobody.

Dev comes back with two teas going cold in paper cups and finds you staring at the sky. He asks what you were looking at. You tell him the cloud, which is true, and that the cab hinge has a grey-tipped feather caught in it, which is also true. You work it free, fold it into your breast pocket, and say nothing about the notice still in your head with a new address written on it.