Large shaded angel wings tattoo spanning the back, with feathers in brown and grey tones and warm rust accents.

Angel wings across a back

Realism · Back · Mixed · Photo

A pair of angel wings covers most of the back, one wing on each side of the spine. The feathers are drawn with dark outlines and soft shading that gives them depth and a three-dimensional look. Muted browns, greys and rust-coloured highlights sit against the bare skin, with the design centred on the back.

Realism Back Angel wing Wing Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Abbott has you sorting the bin of primaries by light, the way she taught you to sort wool, and you keep confusing the greys with the rust. The shop smells of glue and camphor. Outside on Market Street the lorries grind up from the quarry, and the windows shiver in their frames each time one passes.

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The commission came in February from the Methodist chapel in Garth Mill, who want an angel for the Whitsun procession, life-sized, with wings that will stand up in a wind. Mrs Abbott says a hat is a small wing and a wing is a large hat, and you must never be frightened of the difference. She lays the frame across the trestle and you begin pinning, feather by feather, the dark ones at the base shading toward the rust-coloured tips that came from a hen pheasant her brother shot on the moor and never asked to be paid for.

By April the left wing is finished and the right is only half made, and Mrs Abbott has gone to the infirmary in Leeds with her chest. The chapel secretary comes on Thursday to ask whether it will be ready. You tell him the left one will, and you show him how the feathers overlap like slates, each one lifting a little at the edge so the rain runs off. He looks at it a long time and says it is the most like a real bird he has ever seen. You say nothing about the pheasant.

On the Saturday you go up to the workroom alone and find the right wing's last feather lying on the sill, rust-tipped, where someone has left the window open an inch. You pin it in place, press the glue down with your thumb, and the draught from the street lifts it, then lets it settle.