Black and grey fairy wing tattoo spanning the upper back of a person with red hair and raised arms, with brown shading in the wing panels.

Fairy wings across a back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large pair of wings is tattooed across the upper and mid back, with the top of the wings near the shoulder blades and long tapering lower sections reaching toward the waist. The linework is bold and dark, with vein-like lines dividing each wing into panels, and the panels are shaded with greys and soft brown-purple tones. The subject is photographed from behind against a plain pale wall, with arms raised and the tattoo filling most of the frame.

Back Wing Back

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

Old Tamsin Rowe kept the light on Carrick Skerry for thirty-one years and never once let the lamp go dark. When the fog rolled in off the water in autumn, the lesser folk climbed up out of the wrack and sat along the iron rail, grey as ash and smelling of wet slate, asking for a little oil to warm their wings. She gave it to them, because a keeper gives what she has and asks nothing for the light.

Keep reading

They were not kind, exactly, and they were not cruel. They paid in small things: a silver button turned up in the kelp, a gull's egg that hatched true, a child's lost tooth returned in a cockle shell. The one called Pell came most nights. Her wings were slate at the crown, and the lower panels had faded to the purple of bruised plums, because she had flown too close to the flame one summer long gone and never got her full colour back.

One January the fog stayed three weeks. The supply boat did not come, and the oil ran low. Tamsin rationed the lamp to an hour at dusk, and the fairies grew thin along the rail, their panels rattling like dry leaves. On the last night Pell tapped at the glass with a bent knuckle, her wings torn raggedly at the edges. "Take the lower one," she said. "It will burn without smoke."

Tamsin would not. She said a keeper does not take from those who have nothing to spare. But Pell only smiled the way fog smiles and pressed the panel into her hand, thin as a dried petal and warm as a loaf. Tamsin dipped it in the last of the oil and set it in the lamp, and it burned clear and steady until the thaw. In spring the ships came back, and Pell came back too, her wings whole again in slate and plum. She left a silver button on the sill, and it was the only payment Tamsin ever kept.