Black ink line drawing of a hooded angel with a halo and one wing, with the word grace written in a looping single line, fine line style, no body part shown.

Angel with halo and the word grace

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A single continuous black line draws a stylised angel with closed eyes, a halo above the head and one wing at the side. The lower body loops into a figure of eight, and the word grace is written in cursive script along the base of the loop. The image is a simple black linework sketch on plain off-white paper, centred in the frame with plenty of empty space around it.

Fine line Angel Halo Wing Script Infinity

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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

Brother Anselm told me a line must never leave the page. He had watched me sketch the psalter initials for three winters and said my hand lifted too often, as if afraid of committing. So I was set to copy the angel painted over the cloister lectern, drawn in a single stroke by some Lincolnshire painter long dead, and to do it without taking the pen from the vellum.

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The trouble was the loop at the bottom. The angel's robe ran down, curled back on itself and crossed its own body in a figure of eight, and every time my nib reached the crossing it wanted to stop and think. Anselm sat with his hands in his sleeves and let me fail for a week. On the eighth night I stopped trying to be neat and let the stroke wander. The crossing came out wrong, a little fat, and I wrote beneath it, because the words had to go somewhere: the single word the painter had left at the foot, grace, looping one letter into the next without a gap.

Anselm found the sheet in the morning and held it to the window for a long time. He did not praise it. He traced the infinity with one finger and said the old painter had made the same mistake on purpose, so the angel would never be finished, only kept going. Then he took the pen from me and wrote the word again beneath mine, and the nib lifted only once, at the final e, which he said was allowed.