Black and grey ink drawing of a spread-winged creature built from stippled dotwork, shown as a tattoo flash design on white paper.

Stippled winged creature design in black ink

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A single black ink drawing of a symmetrical, spread-winged creature with jagged wing edges and a central body. Shading is built from dense stippling and dotwork, with solid black areas at the wing undersides and tail-like forms. The design sits centred on a plain pale background with no other elements.

Dotwork Blackwork Wing Bat Dotwork Design

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

Dearest Hesk, the thing came down off the Mother Scarp again three nights ago, and this time it did not turn back at the lamps. I watched it from the sheepfold wall. Its wings were spread wider than the lintel of your old forge, their edges broken like flint struck too many times, and where the moonlight caught its back there were a thousand small pale points, as if someone had gone over the hide with a bone awl and never stopped.

Keep reading

Old Garun says it is the same beast his grandfather painted on the gate stones at Dun Harrow, the one the potters' guild paid to have chiselled out. I told him the guild had been dead forty years, and he only laughed and said the dead are very good at keeping their promises. You will think I have been at the sour wine again.

This morning we found tracks in the ash below the gate, three-clawed and deep, and beside them a single black feather as long as my forearm, speckled all over with white like starlight on a pond. I have kept it in the chest with your letters. I have not told the council.

I have pinned the feather to the board beside the lamp, and every time I look at it I count the dots and get a different number. Come home before the moon is full, Hesk. Bring more ink.