Two photographs of a large feathered wing tattoo across a person's back, with grey shading and purple, teal and yellow colour streaks.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Feathered wings across the back

Back · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo covers the upper and middle back with a pair of wings made of many layered feathers. Fine dark linework and grey shading give the feathers volume, while purple, teal and yellow ink runs through them as flowing streaks. The left photo shows the full back, and the right photo is a close side view of the wing along the spine.

Back 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 lift on Ward 9 stuck between the third and fourth floors at ten past three, and I was the one who had to climb out through the hatch and tell the night sister. Nobody else on the rota would have thought to check the stairwell window, which is where I found the feather.

Keep reading

It was caught in the mesh of the sill, as long as my forearm, grey at the root and then streaked with violet, with a teal line running down its vane as if someone had drawn it with a wet brush and forgotten to hurry. Nobody on the ward kept birds. The only thing up there with wings was the painted heron in the family room, which the cleaners had been meaning to paint over since spring.

I took it to the day desk anyway. Sister Achebe turned it over under the lamp and said it looked like something you'd wear to a fancy dress party, then went quiet and said bed fourteen had asked for a box of pastels that afternoon, and had been drawing wings on the back of every menu they brought her. The bed was stripped by the time I got there. The pastels were lined up on the locker in order of colour, the yellow one worn down to a stub.

I laid the feather on the pillow, where it sat exactly in the dent. Then I went back down in the lift, which had started working again, and on the way out I left the stairwell window open a crack, the way you would for something that might still be coming back.