Black silhouette tattoo design of a pair of feathered wings above a long tapering central spike, drawn on a plain white background.

Symmetrical black wings with a long spike

Black and grey · Flash

A solid black silhouette of two symmetrical wings, each built from pointed feather tips, rises from a single long tapering vertical form. The linework is bold and filled with no internal shading, so the shapes read as flat negative and positive space. The image is monochrome on a plain white background, with the composition centred and vertical.

Wing Feather Spike Symmetry Silhouette

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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

You want the wings, I know, but the wings are only half of it, and the half nobody talks about is the post. Back when the Carlisle line still ran its night mail, a porter called Tobias Crane kept the signal box at the north end, and every night at ten past eleven a grey envelope came up the wire from the junction at Penrith, though there was no wire left by then, only the bell. He never opened them. He stamped each one and pinned it to the board behind him, and the board filled up, and the old men on the platform bench said that was the trouble with Tobias, he was too neat for a man in a draughty box.

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Then one February the envelopes stopped arriving, and in their place a single feather came through the letter slot, long and black, its tip sharp enough to prick the thumb. Tobias held it to the lamp and saw a spine down its middle as straight as a rail. He walked the line that night with it tucked behind his ear, past the water tower and the dead sidings, until he reached the spot where the two tracks run so close you could pass a hand between them. There, standing on the sleepers, was a tall spike of iron driven into the ballast, and rising from it, out of nothing, two wings folded flat against the dark.

He never told anyone what the wings said to him. The bench men say he came back before the first train and pinned the feather to the board beside the grey envelopes, and that afterwards, if you stood very still at ten past eleven, you could hear the bell ring once, softly, for a message nobody had sent. The feather is still there, I'm told, though the box is a café now and the board has been painted white.