Black and grey realism tattoo of a crouched winged angel with large feathered wings and loose feathers across the upper and lower back.

Crouched angel with wings on a back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large back tattoo shows a winged figure crouched with its arms wrapped around its knees and its head bowed, set between two wide, detailed wings. Loose feathers drift down the lower back below the wings. The shading is soft and smooth, with fine feather detail and strong contrast between the dark background and the pale figure, and the whole piece is in black and grey.

Realism Back Angel Wing Feather Figure

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada had swept the feathers off the quay every morning since the angel arrived in February. It sat on the bollard outside the chandler's with its arms locked around its knees and its head bowed, as if the weather were a sentence it had to sit through. Feathers came off it in the wind, grey-brown as a wood pigeon's, and drifted down the cobbles into the gutter.

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The harbourmaster wanted it moved. The vicar wanted it blessed. Ada wanted only the cobbles clean, so she bundled the feathers into a flour sack and carried them up to the bakehouse, where Mr Oyelaran stuffed them into pillows for the sailors' lodging on Chapel Row. Nobody asked the angel what it was waiting for. Ada thought that was the decent thing, the way you don't ask a stranger at the bus stop why he's crying.

In October the wind swung round to the north-east, and the great wings lifted slowly, like a tide turning. The angel looked up at her for the first time. Its face was plain and anxious, like a clerk's on pay day. "Is there a boat due?" it asked. "Not for a week," Ada said. "Then I'll wait out the week."

That evening she came back with a tin mug of tea and a currant bun and set them on the bollard beside it. In the morning the mug was empty, rinsed and turned upside down on the stone, and not a single feather lay on the quay. The cobbles were clean for the first time since February, and Ada swept them anyway, out of habit.