Black and grey photograph of a realistic angel wings tattoo across the upper back of a woman facing away from the camera.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black angel wings across a woman's back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman is photographed from behind with her face turned away, showing a large pair of angel wings tattooed across her upper back and shoulder blades. The feathers are rendered in soft grey shading with dark tips, giving a realistic, three-dimensional look against a dim, streaked background. The image is entirely black and grey, with the wings as the central focus.

Realism Back Angel wing Wing Feather Back Woman

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

Mr Abel Cutler had sorted feathers for thirty years in the back room of a hat shop on Chapel Street, where the light came in grey through a window painted with fox-hunt scenes. Rook, jackdaw, pheasant, the flight feathers of pigeons bought by the sack from the market. He could tell a primary from a covert with his eyes shut, and he could tell when a feather had been pulled rather than moulted, which the dealers never admitted.

Keep reading

The commission came in October on thick cream paper: a pair of wings, full span, for a travelling theatre company bound for Hull and then the Baltic. The letter asked for black, but not the black of crow. "Make them look as if they have been out in weather," it said. Abel spent three nights matching dark tips to pale quills, shading each barb with soot and gum arabic until the vanes seemed to lift off the table.

On the fourth night the lamp guttered, and he found tucked in the bottom of the dealer's sack a single long feather, grey as wet slate, with a neat notch cut near the base. Someone had kept it back on purpose. He turned it over in his fingers and thought of the letter's line about weather, and of the girl who had come to the shop two winters before asking for a feather she could not name, paying in coppers still warm from her hand.

He finished the pair by dawn and sent them south on the carrier's cart without signing his name. When the company wrote back, it was only a single line: they had worn the wings on the quay at Hull, and a gull had come down onto the rail to look. Abel kept the notched feather in his waistcoat pocket after that, and each morning he rubbed its tip between finger and thumb to see whether it had gone soft yet.