Hawk Tattoo Ideas, Designs and Meaning

What a hawk tattoo means

The difference from an eagle is the difference between a flag and a companion. Eagles were chosen by empires and republics, and on skin they still read as belonging to something large. Hawks were flown. For thousands of years people have carried them on the fist, fed them, trained them and sometimes lost them, and a hawk tattoo usually keeps that closeness: it is a bird a person could actually have known.

The second reading is attention. Most hawks hunt from a perch, watching one patch of ground for a long time and then committing all at once, and watching like a hawk is the whole meaning in four words: patience that is never passive. It suits a discipline, a job that depends on noticing, or anyone who wants a reminder to look properly before moving.

Egypt supplies the protective reading. Horus, the sky god of kingship, was drawn as a falcon or a falcon-headed man in the double crown of Upper and Lower Egypt, and the teardrop line under his eye is the facial stripe of a real falcon. That eye became the wedjat, an amulet for healing and protection. Strictly Horus is a falcon, but Victorian Egyptologists wrote hawk so often that the two words still travel together.

The hunter reading is worth choosing on purpose. A hawk with a snake gripped in its talons is victory over something that could have killed you, which makes it as much a survival image as an aggressive one. Politics adds an edge of its own: a hawk has meant the side arguing for war since the War Hawks pushed the United States Congress toward war with Britain in 1812, and in some rooms that reading arrives first.

Even its voice has been lent out. The harsh, falling scream that films give to bald eagles is nearly always a red-tailed hawk dubbed in, because a real bald eagle has a thin, chattering call. It is a fair summary of the two birds: the eagle has the reputation, and the hawk has the edge.

Where the design comes from

Falconry is the history that matters here, and it is written down in unusual detail. The Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II wrote De arte venandi cum avibus, a treatise on hunting with birds, in the thirteenth century, and much of what it records about how raptors fly and moult still holds. The Boke of Saint Albans, printed in 1486, went further and matched birds to ranks: an eagle for an emperor, a gyrfalcon for a king, a goshawk for a yeoman, a kestrel for a knave. The list was more fancy than practice, but it fixed the idea that the eagle is the ruler's bird and the hawk the working one. UNESCO inscribed falconry as intangible cultural heritage in 2010. The bird has a legal history in the United States too, where the Migratory Bird Treaty Act has covered hawks since 1972: most people may not keep even a moulted wild feather, and many Native American nations hold hawk feathers as ceremonial. Drawing the bird borrows nothing; copying a feather arrangement from somebody's regalia would.

Choosing yours

• Settle which hawk before anything else. The red-tail most people picture is a broad-winged soaring bird with a pale breast, a dark belly band and a fanned tail that turns brick red in adults. The woodland hawks, the goshawk, the sparrowhawk and Cooper's hawk, have short rounded wings and a long narrow tail for weaving between trees. Harris's hawk is dark chocolate with chestnut shoulders and white at the base and tip of the tail, and it is one of very few raptors that hunts in family groups. Each is a different outline, and a hawk drawn from memory tends to blur all three.
• Without the eagle's jutting brow ridge a raptor head reads as a hawk, and that is the detail to protect. A hawk's head is slimmer, rounder at the crown and smaller against the body, and its beak is shallower; lower the brow and deepen the beak and the drawing becomes a small eagle whatever the caption says. Barring across the breast and tail is the other signature, and it depends on fine parallel stripes, so ask how it will be simplified at your size.
• Choose the pose for what the bird is doing. A perched hawk is not resting: perching is how most hawks hunt, so a bird on a branch is the animal at work and the most accurate hawk you can wear. Wings spread and seen from below is the soaring red-tail, and it needs width. A hooded hawk on a gauntlet is a different subject again, about trust between a bird and the person who flies it, and it only makes sense with the glove in the picture.

Common questions