Black and grey realism tattoo of a crouched angel with large feathered wings covering a man's entire back, with loose feathers below.

Crouching angel with wings across a back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large tattoo covers most of a man's back, showing a crouched, faceless angel with its head bowed and arms folded over its knees. Its wings spread outward on both sides and are rendered with fine feather detail and soft shading. Small loose feathers are scattered across the lower back, and the work is entirely in black and grey ink.

Realism Back Angel Wing Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pull your chair closer, love, the heating in this block only ever reaches the third landing, and the lift has been stuck between the sixth and seventh since Easter. Don't look at the stairwell like that. I'm not making it up. Up on the top floor of Calder House, before they painted the walls that dreadful green, there was an angel sitting on the landing outside flat thirty-one.

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Nobody saw it arrive. Mrs Okonedo found grey feathers on the concrete every morning, soft as pigeon down and far too large for any pigeon. The angel never lifted its head. It sat with its arms folded across its knees and its wings pressed wide against the wall, as if it had folded itself small to fit in a building never meant for anything with wings. The council man came with a clipboard and wanted it moved. He tried. The feathers clung to his sleeves, and he went down the stairs without his clipboard.

Then old Mr Pryce, who had been deaf since the Falklands and talked to the lamp posts, carried a flask up the stairs and sat down beside it. He said nothing for three days. On the fourth he asked it what it was waiting for. Its shoulders moved, only a little, and feathers drifted down the well like snow falling the wrong way. Mr Pryce said he'd wait too, then. So they both did, and nobody on Calder House ever complained about the noise of the stairs again.

Mr Pryce went first, in the spring. The next morning there was one feather on the bottom step, and it was the only one anyone had ever seen come down from the top.