Black ink design of a crowned, winged figure cradling a stippled globe, framed by a circle, two stars and a line of lettering beneath, with no placement shown.

Crowned winged figure holding a globe

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A crowned, winged female figure with long flowing hair holds a stippled globe with a dark continent silhouette, set inside a black circle with two eight-pointed stars. Feathers on the wings are rendered with hatching, and a line of hand-drawn lettering sits below the circle. The work is in black ink on paper with no colour, and the composition is centred and symmetrical.

Dotwork Angel Crown Globe Star Wing Lettering Stipple

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dolores Finch held the sign-writing contract for the Gaiety Palais because nobody else in Margate would climb the scaffold in February. On the Saturday, the manager, Harold Pym, stood at the foot of her ladder with his thumbs hooked in his waistcoat and told her the angel had to come down before the Sunday dance. "Too many notions," he said, squinting up at the words. "The vicar's been in."

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She had painted the angel in a single week. The crown rose in tall points, two eight-pointed stars hung in the black sky, and the feathers were hatched like slate on a roof. The globe sat cupped in her hands, its dark continent stippled in with a thousand patient dots from a sable nib. The lettering had not been planned. Her brush had slipped on the lower board and a crooked line had come out wrong, so she had gone over it carefully, every letter as clumsy as a schoolgirl's, and somehow the whole thing had stuck.

That night she climbed back up with a bucket and a rag and found she could not bring herself to wipe it. Below, the band tuned up, a saxophone wandering through a scale, and Harold bellowed for her to hurry. She thought about the globe, how heavy it must be to hold for ever, and how little it would take for it to tip.

She came down and told Harold the stars sat too high for the lamps to catch them properly. Then she held out her hand for her wages, and he gave her a numbered cloakroom disc because he had no coins left in the till. By nine the floor was full and the crown glowed under the chandeliers. Nobody in the hall could say for certain whether the angel was holding the world up or simply waiting to see what it would do.