Traditional style eagle tattoo with a red sun, a lettered banner and a purple flower on a person's upper arm.

Traditional eagle with banner on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A large eagle with spread wings and a red sun behind it covers the upper arm, with a grey banner containing short lettering beneath. A purple flower with green leaves sits below the banner, and red accent lines surround the design. Bold black outlines and flat, solid colour in yellow, red, purple and green dominate the composition.

Traditional Upper arm Eagle Sun Banner Lettering Flower Leaves

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Marguerite has been nine days out of Liverpool when the wind drops to nothing and the sun climbs out of the swell like a coin someone has dropped in a bucket. You are on the forecastle with a tin of black ink and a borrowed needle, because Tomasz has gone below with his fever and nobody else aboard will admit to drawing. The watch gathers round, arguing over whether an eagle can be made to look cross.

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You sketch it on the back of a chart, wings spread wide over a red sun, hooked beak turned towards the bow as if it has spotted land. Cook wants a banner under it with letters on. "Initials," he says, scratching his beard. "Hers, not mine." You letter K, H, T in plain capitals, and the bosun says a banner needs room to breathe, so you give it room, then a purple flower beneath, its leaves dark green from the bottle of verdigris you were saving for the mainmast.

By the afternoon the ink has dried a shade lighter than you wanted, and the sea is so flat you can hear the cook singing below. Cook sits still with his sleeve rolled and tells you about a woman in Bristol who promised to write and didn't, and how he has never once been able to pick the letters out of the sea. You work the needle slowly, keeping your hand steady for him, and he does not flinch.

When the trade wind finally fills the sails off Valparaiso, Cook walks down the gangway with the eagle facing forward, its wings catching the light. Nobody asks whether it is the ship it is steering for or the woman who never wrote back, and you do not tell him that you drew the beak looking the other way at first, before you thought better of it.