Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pencil sketch of a pair of angel wings

Black and grey · Flash

A graphite pencil drawing of a symmetrical pair of angel wings, with long layered feathers, soft shading and darker quill tips. The wings are drawn on ruled notebook paper, with the lines of the paper visible behind the sketch. The drawing is in black and grey only, and the composition is centred with the wings spread outward.

Wing Angel wing Feather Sketch Pencil drawing

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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

Right, sit still and keep that torch steady, because this bit happens in the dark. Up on the fourteenth floor of Halland House there was a lad called Tomasz who drew in the back of his maths exercise book every lesson. The paper was ruled blue, so every feather he made sat on the lines like a bird on a washing line. Nobody paid him any mind. His mum worked nights at the laundry on Canal Road, and his dad had gone back to Gdansk and stopped writing, so the drawing was the only thing in that flat that ever got finished.

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He drew wings. Not birds, he was very clear on that, wings, two of them, spread wide so they filled the page from edge to edge. He did the long flight feathers first, layering them like slates on a roof, then pressed the pencil hard on the quill tips until they shone. Mrs Okafor from downstairs said they looked like the ones in the window at St Clement's. Tomasz told her that was rubbish, because the church ones were made of glass and these were made of him.

Then one February night the bins caught fire behind the block, the lift stopped, and smoke climbed the stairwell like it had somewhere to be. The firemen found Tomasz on the landing, sitting with the exercise book open on his knees. He had gone back up for it, which is the daftest thing I ever heard. The pages were smudged where his thumb had kept turning them, and the wings were still there, spread across the paper as if they'd been waiting for him to finish.

He said he'd only been waiting for the smoke to thin, and then he'd have gone down the stairs the proper way. That's what he told them. Now hush, because the next bit is the part with the feathers.