Close-up of a small black outline pair of angel wings tattooed on the inner forearm near the wrist, with the hand resting on white fur.

Pair of small angel wings on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A hand with pale pink square nails rests on white fur, showing a small tattoo on the inner forearm near the wrist. The tattoo is two separate wings, one angled up and one angled down, drawn in black outline with fine feather detail. The palette is black and white with the soft, bright fur filling the background.

Fine line Forearm Wing Angel wing Feather Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Corran Bryce had carved angels for the chapel at Skerrow for thirty years, and the parish had never once asked him for a pair. When the vicar's widow commissioned a memorial for her husband, she wanted matching wings, two mirrored halves cut from the same block of pale limestone. Corran shaped the first from the north face of the quarry and set it above the lintel in April, where it caught the morning light and looked well enough.

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The second wing he finished in June, but it would not sit. He turned it, flipped it, shaved the joint and tried again, and still it pointed the wrong way, lifting towards the harbour while its partner dipped towards the graves. His apprentice, a boy called Tobin Vell who ate pilchards straight from the tin, said the stone had a mind of its own. Corran said stone had no mind, only grain, and that he had simply cut against it.

That night he walked down to the shore with a lamp and the wing wrapped in sacking. The tide was out and the sand was ribbed like the underside of a feather. He set the stone on the wet ridges, facing the water, and went home to bed. By morning it was gone. The fishermen said a gull had carried it off, which nobody believed, and the widow paid him anyway.

The chapel still has its one wing up on the lintel. Years later, a net hauled off the point brought up a pale stone wrapped in rotten sacking, and Tobin's grandson fixed it beside the first, pointing down. From the pier on still days you can see the pair, one lifting towards the water and one pulling back towards the graves, and the old men say that is exactly how a pair of wings should look: never quite agreeing on which way to go.