Pencil drawing of a pair of feathered angel wings crossed at the base, shaded in black and grey as a realistic tattoo design with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crossed angel wings design

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

A graphite pencil drawing of two large angel wings, with the lower ends of the wings crossing over one another in the centre of the page. Each feather is drawn individually with layered hatching and dark shading that creates depth and a strong sense of light and shadow. The design is in black and grey on a pale background, with the wings filling most of the frame.

Realism Angel wing Wing Feather

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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

The wings had been sitting on the high rail above the wardrobe at the Lantern Theatre since March, and nobody would say who had ordered them. Mrs Okafor, who ran the costume room with a pincushion strapped to each wrist, said they had come up from the cellar in a tea chest with a card tucked under the tissue that read only: cross them, do not mend. So I did not mend them. I lifted the frame down on a Tuesday night, when the building had emptied and the radiators had started their knocking, and laid it across two trestles under the work lamp.

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The quills were graphite grey and so finely shaded that in the lamplight they seemed to move when I breathed near them. Each feather had been drawn and then stitched to the next with waxed thread, layer over layer, so that the two wings met low down and locked together like a pair of hands. On the underside of the lowest feathers, in the same soft pencil, someone had written small numbers. The count began at the crossing and ran outward, up both wings, to the tips. Four hundred and twelve on the left. Four hundred and twelve on the right.

I sat with a mug of tea going cold and worked it out, the way you do when there is nobody to tell you to go home. A feather a day, perhaps, or a feather for every rehearsal that had never been staged. The numbers stopped at the very last quill on each wing, and both of those were blank. I found a stub of carpenter's pencil in my apron, pressed the paper flat, and wrote 413 beneath the crossing on the left. Then I threaded a needle with the waxed cord, knotted it twice, and drew the stitch tight through the place where the wings became one.