Traditional style eagle with spread wings and orange talons tattooed on a forearm, shaded in black, grey, red and orange ink.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional eagle on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A bold eagle with its wings raised dominates the arm, with its head turned sharply to the left and its open beak in orange and red. The feathers use solid black and grey shading with bright red and orange highlights, and the talons are outlined in heavy black lines. Thick outlines and flat, saturated colour give the piece a classic American traditional look, set against the curve of the arm.

Traditional Forearm Eagle Bird Wing Feather Talon Beak

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The eagle came down to Porthcarrow the week the lifeboat was sold for scrap, and it settled on the drying pole outside Madge Tully's ropeworks as though it had paid the rent on it. Nobody could say where it had flown from. The old men said the cliffs above Gull Head, the young ones said a travelling show over at Redmouth, and Madge said it could sit where it liked so long as it kept its beak off her tarred twine.

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It turned its head sharply to the left whenever the harbour bell rang, and it kept its eyes on the bar of sand where the river met the sea. The fishermen tried it with pilchards and it looked at them as if they had insulted its mother. Its wings stayed folded for three days, then on the fourth evening the wind backed round to the north-west and the eagle lifted off the pole with a sound like a sheet being shaken out.

The Ada Rose was four hours overdue when the rain came sideways over the point. Women stood on the quay with lanterns that the wind kept putting out. Madge saw the bird come in low over the breakwater, wings raised and talons spread, and then it was gone into the spray. Nobody moved for a long time. At first light the eagle came back and dropped a coil of wet tow line on her doorstep, and behind it, grey and grinning through the mist, came the Ada Rose with her mainsail torn and her crew waving their caps.

The town voted that spring to paint the bird on the new lifeboat's hull. Madge held the brush herself and got the wings wrong twice. When it was finished, a red streak ran down the bow where the paint had caught the rope, and she never went back to correct it.