Back of a person with short dark hair showing large realistic black and grey angel wings tattooed across the upper back and shoulders.

Black and grey wings across upper back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph taken from behind shows a pair of large feathered wings tattooed across the upper back, spanning from the shoulder blades out toward the shoulders. The feathers are rendered in soft, layered shading with fine gradients from black to pale grey, giving them a three-dimensional, realistic look. The wearer has a white halter top tied at the neck and a black bra strap, and the background shows shelves and boxes in an indoor room.

Realism Back Wing Angel wing Feather Back

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 feather-counter of Harrowgate was not supposed to sit in the royal dovecote after dark, but Mother Ysolde had died in the spring and nobody else knew how many quills the old hawks had shed. I had her ledger open on my knee and a candle stub guttering in a dish of lamp oil. Outside, the wind came off the Marrow Hills smelling of coal smoke, and the doves shifted in their nests like a congregation settling into pews.

Keep reading

The king's gift to his bride was to have wings, real ones, grown from the pale-bellied kestrels of the north. Ysolde's task had been to match each primary feather to a shadow, so that when the wings were fitted they would cast the dark the lady needed, grey at the tips and black along the spine. Every feather had a name in her hand. Hesper, Tallow, Vane. I found Vane near the bottom of the last page, struck through, and beside it a line in a different ink: the one that goes home is not the one that was sold.

I had not understood it until I went down to the aviary at dawn and found the bride's dressmaker weeping over a wicker frame. The wings had been shaded wrong on purpose. Someone had lightened the feathers the way they fade when a bird is coming in from a long flight, dark at the root and paler toward the light. Ysolde had known the king would never see the difference. Only the bride would, when she turned her back to a mirror and found herself already flying.

I took the ledger, the candle and the quill that had been named Vane, and I walked north with the doves following me as far as the wall. Some things in Harrowgate are meant to be counted once and then carried.