Back view of a woman in a black off-shoulder dress with two red feathered wing tattoos on her upper back, one on each side of the spine.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red wings across upper back

Back · Colour · Photo

A woman seen from behind, with her hair pinned up, wears a black off-shoulder dress against a plain brown backdrop. Two large wings are tattooed on her upper back, rendered in red ink with feather shapes layered in shades of red and darker tones. The composition is centred on the wings, with the dress and backdrop keeping the focus on the tattoo.

Back Wing Feather Angel wing Woman 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 gull came in through the galley hatch the morning we lost the port trawl, and it sat on the rack above the tatie pot as if it had paid for the seat. Cook said it was a bad omen. Mrs Ada Fenn said most things were, if you wanted them to be, and she shook a cloth at it until it went.

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What it left behind was a single wing feather, rust-red at the tip and darker toward the quill, caught on the hook where she hung the bacon knife. I took it up to the wheelhouse to show Skipper Tully. He turned it over under the lamp and said a gull's feather was never that colour unless someone had dipped it, then looked at me the way men look at a boy who has been told too much.

Ada would not have it thrown out. She pinned it inside the locker above the flour and told me wings grow in layers, each one laid over the last so the water runs off, and a thing built that way can take a beating and still lift. We ran into weather off Flamborough that night. The pans slid, the porridge went over, and I held the rail with one hand and the feather in my head.

When we came home with the hold half full, Ada took the feather down and pressed it into my palm. Keep it, she said, you've got the knack of coming back up. I still carry it. Some nights I think of how she never once looked back at the hatch, and how the light came through it red.