Solid black stylised design of a flame or bird with spiked wing-like feathers rising from a pointed base, on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stylised black flame and wing design

Black and grey · Flash

A solid black silhouette of a stylised flame or bird with tapering, spiked feathers fanning out on either side of a central upright form. Thin white lines separate the layered feathers from the central body, and the design narrows to a point at the base. It is rendered in flat black with no shading or grey tones, on a plain white background.

Flame Wing Bird Feather Silhouette

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

The lamp was supposed to be lit by Aunt Maud, but she had gone down to the harbour wall with a bottle of sloe gin and a grievance about the caterers, so at a quarter to four it fell to me to carry the old storm lantern up the cliff path in my good shoes. Grandfather had cut its tin shade himself in the winter of 1951, punching a long tapering flame up the middle and fanning feathers out either side, so that when the wick was burning the shadows of the wings swept across the grass like something about to take off.

Keep reading

The wind came straight off the Atlantic that afternoon and the matches in my pocket were damp from the walk. Tomasz, the groom's younger brother, stood beside me holding the cake knife as if it might help, and somewhere behind the marquee a string quartet was tuning up in the wrong key. I knelt in the wet grass, curled my hands around the chimney, and struck match after match until one caught and cupped itself against my palm long enough to find the wick. The flame stood up thin and blue, then yellow, and the guests on the lawn went quiet in the way people do when they have stopped pretending not to watch.

Aunt Maud arrived at the top of the path with her hat in her hand and a face full of gin and tenderness. She looked at the lantern for a long moment and then at me. "He always said the shade was for keeping the flame, not the wind," she said, and took the lantern from my hands before I could tell her it was the wind that had nearly beaten me.

When I stood up my knees were soaked and there was a burnt match still pinched between my fingers. The shadows of the wings had reached the couple's feet, and for once nobody needed me to explain anything.