Black and white photo of a shirtless man seen from behind, with detailed black and grey feathered wing tattoos across his back and upper arms.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Feathered wings across back and arms

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The photo shows a shirtless man seen from behind with both arms raised and fists clasped above his head. Large feathered wings are tattooed across his upper back and extend over the upper arms, with fine, detailed linework and soft shading on the individual feathers. The monochrome image has a plain dark background and even studio lighting that emphasises the musculature and the tattoo.

Realism Back Upper arm Wing Feather Back

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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 carved wing came off the Ada Brindle in March, when the ice let go of the lock gates at Keadby and the whole hull groaned like a dog shaking off water. Dad said it was rot. I said it was the frost, and we argued about it the way we argued about everything, loudly, over the tiller, with the kettle going on the little stove below.

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Nobody on the cut had ever carved a wing like that. Dad had bought the barge from an old boatman named Sully Haig, who swore the pattern came from a Dutch joiner who had lost his brother at Jutland and wanted something to keep the water off him. Sully was drunk when he told it, so I never knew what to believe. What I knew was the feathers: each one cut separately, lipped at the edge, so the rain ran off them in neat lines.

I found the piece in the reed bed below Thorne, caught against a sunken pallet, its tip still sharp enough to nick my thumb. I carried it back along the towpath for two miles with the wet coming through my coat. At the lock I rowed across to the cottages where Sully's widow kept a workshop full of sawdust and unfinished oars, and I asked her to fix it.

She turned it over, sighted down the grain, and said the wing was never meant to stay on the roof. It was a rudder, she said, a thing to steer by, and it needed to go back in the water. So we bolted it to the stern instead, facing forward, and the next morning when the Ada Brindle slid out past the gates the feathers caught the light and seemed, for a moment, to lift the whole boat an inch off the brown water.