Black and grey Celtic cross with interlaced knotwork and shaded angel wings across the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Celtic cross with angel wings on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large Celtic cross with interlaced knotwork fills the centre of the image, with shaded feathered wings spreading out on either side. The cross uses solid black areas and bold outlines, while the wings are rendered in soft grey gradients. The tattoo sits centrally on a bare back, photographed in warm, even light.

Back Cross Angel wing Wing Knotwork Feather

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 knotwork on the headland cross had no end, and Mairead Tully had been told so by every mason who came to Porthcarrow since her grandfather's day. You followed one strand around and it brought you back under itself, over and under, the way the tide returns to the same slip of shingle. She had tried it once with tarred twine on the kitchen table and lost her place by the third loop.

Keep reading

The cross had been raised for a crew of drowned men whose names nobody could recall. Its arms were black with lichen where the rain pooled, and at dusk the wind off the bay came up under the stone and lifted something pale from the grass, like wings opening. Her brother Eoin swore it was gulls. Mairead had seen gulls. They did not hang still above a grave for an hour and then fold down into the ground again.

The autumn the herring failed, she climbed to the cross with a slate and a nail and began copying the loops from the shadow the stone cast at noon. She worked until her fingers split with the cold. Each evening the wings rose off the grass and hung over her, and each morning the slate held her marks, though she had made none that day.

On the last night of the month she reached the place where the strand should have met its beginning and found it ran on past the cross, under the sea wall, out past the rocks where the boats went down. She followed it with the nail until the light failed. In the morning the boats came in on slack water, every one of them, and Eoin stood on the quay with his cap in his hands and did not ask her where she had been.