Black and grey realistic angel wings tattoo across the upper back of a woman with curly hair, photographed from behind.

Angel wings across a woman's back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman is photographed from behind, showing a large pair of angel wings tattooed across her upper back. The feathers are rendered with soft grey shading and darker black accents along the edges, giving a realistic, sculpted look. The wings are centred on the frame against a blurred green lawn and trees, and her hands rest on the back of her neck.

Realism Back Angel wing Wing 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

The lift at Harrow Point had been dead since March, so I took the stairs to the twenty-second floor with my toolbag and a knee that had opinions about it. Halfway up, on the landing between nineteen and twenty, someone had drawn a pair of wings on the emulsion in carpenter's pencil. Feathers layered like wet slate, each one shaded darker at the edge, as if the wall had been asked to lift off and had nearly agreed.

Keep reading

Mr Okafor, the caretaker, told me a girl called Ruth Ellery had done them the winter her brother went to sea on a tanker and didn't come back. She drew them standing on a kitchen chair, with a biscuit tin for a palette. Three painters had been sent to whitewash that landing since, and three had found reasons to finish early. "Leave the wings," he said. "I'll pay you in cash for the lift."

The fault was a worn cable sheave, twenty minutes' work once I got the cabin panel open. I was on the roof afterwards, sitting on the hatch with a flask, when a racing pigeon came down onto the parapet, grey as the pencil, and shook itself. A single flight feather spun loose and drifted down the stairwell well, turning, past the landing, past the wings, and settled on my bag as if it had been posted there.

I didn't fix it to the wall. I taped it inside the lift panel, behind the fault plate where only engineers look. Now every resident who rides up to twenty-two passes it on the way, and nobody has asked me why I smile at the floor numbers.