Pencil sketch of an ornate cross with feathered angel wings on either side, shaded in grey, drawn as a tattoo design.

Ornate winged cross pencil design

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a tattoo design showing an ornate cross with scrolled, tribal-style arms and diamond-shaped ends, flanked by two large feathered wings. The linework is bold and outlined, with grey shading on the cross and the feathers to suggest depth. The design is centred on a plain off-white background and is shown in black and grey graphite only.

Cross Wing Feather Angel wing Scrollwork Diamond Tribal

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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 bell at St Aldhelm's had been cracked since the flood, and so the night watch in Harrowgate counted the hours by the lamplighters instead. Tobias Keel carried the long pole from gaslight to gaslight along Wick Lane, and he knew every lamp by its own small sound. On the night the iron cross came down from the chapel roof, he heard the wings before he saw anything at all.

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It was not an angel. It was a cross that had grown tired of standing still, its arms scrolled and curling like the ironwork gates of the old cemetery, its ends sharp as diamonds cut from frost. It had two wings folded behind it, long feathers hung with rain, and they dragged on the cobbles with a sound like a broom being drawn slowly over sacking. The cross looked down at Tobias with its curled arms held out, the way a man might offer a coin to a child he did not want to frighten.

He asked it what it wanted. It said only that the lamps were going out one by one, and that a city without light was no place for anything with wings. So Tobias walked it from lamp to lamp, lighting each one with the last of his oil, until the lane shone like a necklace thrown down on black velvet. At the last lamp the cross stopped and turned its diamond head towards the river.

In the morning the cross was back on the chapel roof, dull and cold as it had ever been. But the lamp at the corner of Wick Lane burned all day, and when the lamplighter climbed up to trim its wick he found a single grey feather tucked into the glass, as light as a thought.