Black and grey angel wings tattoo across the upper back of a woman who is seen from behind, wearing a loose white off-shoulder top.

Angel wings tattoo across upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman seen from behind stands in a doorway, with a large pair of feathered angel wings tattooed across her upper back. The feathers are drawn with dark outlines and soft grey shading, giving the wings depth and a layered look. The ink is set against bare skin and a white top, with a dark doorway behind her.

Back Wing Angel wing Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Marjorie Haig had taught art at Hollins Road Comprehensive for thirty-one years, and the reunion committee had printed her name on the programme as guest of honour without asking her first. Dinner was chicken in a sauce nobody liked, served in the sports hall under a banner reading Class of 1994 Remembers. Nobody remembered her, not properly, until Dean Parr came over with a pint in one hand and a folded sheet of cartridge paper in the other.

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He unfolded it on a trestle table between the crisps and the sausage rolls. It was a pair of wings, drawn in pencil and fine biro, each feather outlined hard and then shaded in soft grey so the upper rows seemed to sit over the ones beneath. "You made us do this in Year Nine," he said. "Wings off a bird you'd picked from a book. I told you I couldn't draw a chicken. You sat on the radiator and showed me how to go from dark at the root to pale at the tip."

Marjorie remembered very little of that lesson beyond the heat of the radiator and the smell of pencil shavings. Dean said he had kept the sheet in a drawer for twenty years, long after his mum had thrown out everything else from his bedroom. He wanted to know whether the feathers were meant to be real birds or something else. She studied the layering, the way each row lightened toward its edge, and said she supposed she had been trying to draw something that could lift a person clean off the floor.

He laughed and offered to give it back. She told him to pin it to the noticeboard by the fire door, so it would be the first thing people saw on their way out. When she left, the hall was half dark and the paper was still there, grey shading holding what light remained, the feathers spread as though they had only just stopped moving.