Traditional style eagle tattoo with spread wings, black outlines and red and yellow tail feathers, running down a lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional eagle with flame tail on a lower leg

Traditional · Calf · Colour · Photo

A large eagle with spread wings and extended talons is shown in a bold traditional style, with heavy black outlines and grey and white shading on the wings and body. Its tail breaks into long red and yellow feather shapes that look like flames, with black lines dividing them. The tattoo fills a vertical strip of the leg against a plain background of carpet and clothing.

Traditional Calf Eagle Feather Talon Flame Wing Bird

Find an artist for this

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 sand has already crept over the white line on the Carrow Flat road when the radiator gives up. You sit with the bonnet ticking and the heat rising off the tarmac in sheets, and nobody passes for the first two hours. The water in the back seat has gone warm as tea. You try to remember the last sign that said Next Services and cannot.

Keep reading

Then a shadow slides across the bonnet, wide as a door, and you look up. The eagle does not flap. It rides the thermals in long lazy rings, turning its head to take you in with one hard yellow eye. Its tail breaks into streamers that burn red at the root and gold at the tips, and where they trail behind it the air above the flat seems to shake, as though the bird is lighting the road it flies over.

It drops onto the roof of the car with a clang you feel in your teeth. Talons like brass hooks grip the rack. You hold out the keyring your father bought at a petrol station in Dunmere the week before he left, a tin bird with one wing bent, and the eagle leans down and lifts it from your palm as neatly as a clerk taking a receipt. Then it is gone, climbing, the tail flaring like a struck match until it is a red point and then nothing.

A lorry grinds past an hour later, and the driver tows you to Halden Wells without asking about the bird. Only back at the garage do you find a single feather tucked under the wiper, scorched brown along one edge and cool as river stone. You keep it in the glovebox. Some nights, when the engine ticks as it cools, you swear the flat is still warm where the bird stood.