Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a single wing with bold outlines and stippled feather shading, on the outer ankle.

Dotwork wing on an ankle

Dotwork · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A single stylised wing is tattooed on the outer ankle, with its feathers drawn in bold black outlines. The feathers are filled with dense stippled dots that build up soft grey shading toward the edges. The plain, softly blurred background keeps the wing as the clear focus of the frame.

Dotwork Ankle Wing Feather

Find an artist for this

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 last train had gone at twenty to midnight, and Nell Garside was still on platform four with a torch, walking the lamps the way her father had taught her. Station rule: nothing left on the line overnight. She found the thing wedged under the bench, a wing the length of her forearm, carved from pale ash and stippled all over with a dot punch so the grain looked like frost on glass.

Keep reading

Who leaves a wing on a bench? The lost property ledger had no entry for it. She turned it over and found initials pricked into the root, tiny as pinholes, and she knew the hand. Tobias Wren had engraved the brass clock faces at Ashcombe Junction for forty years before retiring to a caravan by the reservoir. He had told her once that dots were slower than lines, and that you could not hurry a shadow.

She rang him from the signal box, let it ring out, then wheeled her bicycle up the lane at one in the morning with the wing balanced across the handlebars. A light was on in the caravan. He opened the door in his vest, looked at the wing, and laughed the way men laugh when they have been caught. "I wondered where I'd put that," he said. "Bring it in. The kettle's on."

He showed her the others: a shelf of wings, each a little larger than the last, every edge stippled and darkening toward the tip. "Every one's for somebody leaving," he said. "I only do the shadow. They do the flying." Nell set the ash wing on the shelf, and it fitted the gap as if it had been measured for it. Walking back down the lane, she watched the sun come up grey over the points, and she wrote in the ledger: one wing, returned to owner.