Black and grey realism tattoo of a muscular, crouching winged figure with spread wings on an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Crouching winged figure on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A muscular figure crouches with its head bowed and hands clasped below, while large feathered wings spread up and out around it. The linework is soft and the shading uses smooth black and grey gradients to model the musculature and feathers. The tattoo fills most of the frame against a plain arm, with a sleeveless white top visible at the edges.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step there, and don't stare at him yet, because he doesn't care to be looked at before the snow has settled. Yes, that's him, crouched over the lip of the Carrow Pass with his brow resting on his fists, the way my grandmother said he'd been sitting since before there was a road. Some call him a guardian and some call him a fallen one, and the carters will argue it with you over cider until the candles gutter.

Keep reading

What I know is this. In the hungry winter, when Dunmere had no bread and the wolves came down to the pens, a girl named Ysolde Pell climbed the pass alone with a lamp and a loaf wrapped in sacking. She was nine years old and had been sent to fetch her father, who went over the ridge after a strayed ewe and never came back. The snow came in sideways. Her lamp guttered out. She sat down in the drift, the way you do when cold stops being a feeling and starts being a sleep.

That was when the wings came down around her. He never lifts anyone, mind, so they didn't raise her. He folded them over the path like a roof of slate and kept the wind off her face, while his hands stayed clasped below, holding something warm against the stone. When her father found her at dawn, the figure's head was bowed lower than ever, and the snow on his back was undisturbed everywhere except where she had leaned. Her father swore the statue had shifted. Ysolde only said he'd been listening to her breathe, and she never said anything else about it in all her long life.

Every spring, when the thaw comes roaring down the Carrow, his wings lift the width of a hand and the road opens again. Go on, now. Mind the step.

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