Black line drawing of a winged symbol with a cross and an A-shaped figure, above the words Archangel Michael protects me, shown as a flash design with no body placement.

Archangel Michael wings and cross design

Black and grey · Flash

A bold black line drawing of a stylised winged emblem with a horizontal and vertical cross set inside a pointed A-shaped form. Curved wing outlines arc above and around the central motif, and a handwritten-style caption reads Archangel Michael protects me beneath it. The image is flat black on white with no shading, and the composition is centred and symmetrical.

Wing Cross Symbol Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had been falling on Hollin Gate since Martinmas, and by the second week of Lent the inn's well was a grey hole under a white lid. Mistress Adair counted the barrels in the cellar twice a day and told nobody the number. Her son Tam was nine and believed everything the carters said, including that the drowned miller walked the north road whenever the wind turned.

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On the night the wind turned, a traveller came up the drive with no horse and no lantern. He was a tall man in a coat the colour of wet slate, and he asked for a bed in the name of the Sword. Adair had heard that name in her grandmother's stories, about the cross her grandmother had painted above the lintel, a bright blade with two wings folded either side. She let him in because the door was already open and the snow was blowing across her flags.

He ate nothing. He sat by the fire with his palms flat on his knees and watched the door. Near midnight the latch lifted by itself, and cold came in along the boards like a dog that had been waiting outside. Tam began to cry. The traveller stood, unhurried, and set his back to the child, and the cold stopped at his heels as though it had met a wall.

"It cannot cross the threshold of a house that keeps its word," he said. "Yours has kept its word for three hundred years. Bolt the door and sleep."

Adair bolted the door. In the morning the drive was smooth and the stranger was gone, leaving only a sprig of rowan on the settle. Tam still believes the snow knows his name. Adair keeps the rowan in the niche beneath the painted wings, where the plaster has never once cracked.