Solid black tribal-style eagle design with wings spread wide and talons extended, shown on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal eagle with spread wings

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A bold black eagle in flight, with wings spread wide and feathers broken into sharp, flowing tribal shapes. The head faces left with a hooked beak, and the talons reach forward at the bottom of the design. The image is pure black on white, with no shading or colour.

Blackwork Eagle Bird Wing Talon Feather

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

Brother Edwin had cut the stencil four times before the prior would let it near the vellum. The first three had gone wrong at the wing tips, where the card split along the grain and left the feathers looking like bent nails. He sat now at the scriptorium window with a fresh sheet of black card pinned flat under his left palm and a knife in his right, working the way his master had taught him, never lifting the blade from one curve until it was finished.

Keep reading

The eagle was a commission from the abbey's new patron, a wool merchant from Boston who wanted his arms on every book in the library. Edwin had been told to make it bold. He thought of the old hawk that roosted in the bell tower, the one that dropped feathers into the cloister every autumn, and he gave the wings the same hooked, ragged edges, long flicks of black that rose like flame. The beak he kept sharp. The talons he let reach forward, empty, as if they expected something to be handed to them.

On the last evening the prior came to look. He held the stencil up against the candle and was quiet for a long while. Then he asked why the head faced left, away from the altar. Edwin said he had not thought about it, which was true. The prior smiled and said that a bird always turns toward the thing it means to catch, and he went out without another word.

Edwin sat with the card in his lap until the candle guttered. Then he took the knife and, in the margin of the stencil, cut a small hook of a feather that pointed back toward the door.