Colour tattoo on an upper arm and shoulder showing a woman in a robe with closed eyes beside an eagle, with a large red wing bearing a black double-headed eagle.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Woman and eagle with red wing on upper arm

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A woman with her eyes closed leans towards an eagle's head, and her robed figure is shaded in greys. A large red wing with a black double-headed eagle emblem sweeps down the left side of the design. Red ink dominates the piece, set against grey and black shading on the skin of the upper arm and shoulder.

Upper arm Shoulder Woman Eagle Wing Robe Flag

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Arben, the snow came down the Shkumbin valley three days before the feast, and Father Gjon says the pass will stay shut until Lent. I am writing by the stove in the back room of the guesthouse, where Sister Mrika lets me sit because my hands are no good for the loom in this cold.

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Something to tell you. Yesterday the old abbot unlocked the chest in the scriptorium and showed me the banner the monks kept from Grandmother's time, the red cloth with the two-headed eagle stitched in black. Its wing had split along the fold and nobody had mended it. I asked whether I could try. He said a woman who sews with her eyes closed will not ruin the eagle, and he laughed, but he was not joking about the eyes. I was thinking of the eagle that used to sit on the chapel roof, the one you threw a stone at and missed.

Mend it I did. I counted each stitch the way Mother taught us, and when the thread ran short I leaned my face close to the bird's head, the way you lean to hear something quiet, and I felt a warmth through the cloth that could have been my own breath. Sister Mrika says that is nonsense. Perhaps. But the wing lay flat again by the second night.

This morning the abbot hung it over the altar and the snow stopped. Write when the road opens. Tell me if the bakery by the bridge still sells simit with sesame, and whether you kept my green scarf.