Before and after split of a black and grey realism wing cover-up over an older tribal design on the upper arm and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal shoulder piece covered by a shaded wing

Realism · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

The left panel shows an older solid black tribal design on the shoulder and upper arm, with bold, heavy linework. The right panel shows the same area covered by a large, shaded black and grey wing with fine feather detail and soft grey highlights. The photo is split into two side-by-side views of the same arm, with the tattoos cropped below the shoulder.

Realism Shoulder Upper arm Wing Feather Tribal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mark went on him the summer the river took his brother, when Ned was seventeen and fool enough to think ink could hold a thing in place. A man called Surrey worked out of a caravan at Pelham Fair, and he charged a shilling and a pint of mild for a black knot with horns on it, and Ned sat with his sleeve rolled while the needle hummed like a wasp in a jar.

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For thirty years the mark sat on his shoulder the way a bad debt sits in a ledger. He wore his waistcoat over it at chapel and his shirt sleeves rolled at the lock gates, and nobody in Pelham asked him about it, because everybody knew.

It was his daughter Margaret who went to the picture house in Kettering and came back talking about wings. She had seen a painted angel with feathers thick as a barn owl's, shaded grey where the light fell, and she said it would cover the knot if it were big enough. Ned told her it was daft. He went to the same caravan, which was no longer Surrey's, and a woman with burnt hands looked at his shoulder for a long while.

She did it over three Saturdays. When the last feather was done, Ned stood at the mirror in the back room and could not find the knot at all, only the long dark sweep of a wing lifting off his arm as if it had been waiting there to go somewhere. He walked home by the river without his coat, and the water, for once, did not look like anything but water.