Tribal angel with halo on ribs
Ribs · Black and grey · Photo
A solid black tribal-style angel with a halo above and sweeping wings on either side, with a heart shape formed in the negative space at the chest. The bold, uniform linework and solid black fills are set against lightly tanned skin, and the image is framed from the side of the torso with a grey top lifted above and pink waistband below.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
Mags Tulloch had cooked on the herring boat Constance for nineteen winters, and she kept the galley stove lit even on the nights the sea wanted the crew to sleep in their wet oilskins. The skipper's son, Davy, asked her once why she bothered with a fire nobody could eat from. She told him the stove was the only thing aboard that never forgot to be warm.
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When the Constance went down off the Fair Isle race in a February gale, the village kept the old custom and carved a wooden angel for the chapel wall, one for each boat lost. Mags had no say in it. But the carver, a quiet man named Ewan Reid, made the wings from a spar salvaged from the wreck, and he cut a heart into the space between them, where a body keeps its warmth, so that anyone looking up would find it there.
Years later a boy came in from the rain with coal dust on his face and a cough that rattled like a loose hatch. He stood under the angel until feeling came back into his hands, then asked what the ring above its head was for. Mags, who had come in to light the candles, thought about the galley and the crews who had eaten there.
She said it was to show where the angel had been standing when the weather turned, and that the heart was the part that had to stay lit.
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