Black tribal wing design flash with a central cross and a red rose, shown on a plain white background with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal wings with cross and red rose

Mixed · Flash

A symmetrical flash design of two black tribal-style wings spreading outward from a central cross. A red rose sits at the centre of the cross and is the only element in colour. The wings use bold solid black linework with swirling blackwork-like patterns on a white background.

Wing Tribal Cross Rose

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Our Mam used to say the chapel roof at Hollin Pit had wings of its own, black iron ones that a man could hear creaking when the shift was short and the men were coming up wet and quiet. Nobody believed her but the widows, and the widows never argued. You didn't argue with women who'd lost two husbands to the same seam.

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There was a lad called Tobias Greave who worked the face under the old cross-cut, and he had a red rose he'd carved into the lamp-hook his father left him. He'd say it kept the gas off him. He'd say it the way a man says a thing he's already decided to believe, and he went down every morning with that hook on his belt and the rose facing his hip.

The night the fire-damp came through, the wings came too, or that's how the women told it after. Black shapes swept along the roadway, folding and unfolding, and where they passed the air went clean. Tobias saw them. He stood in the mouth of the cross-cut with his lamp held up and he did not run, because his father had told him running was for men who had somewhere else to be. He hooked his lamp on the rose and the flame turned red as a coal, and the shapes wheeled once and went up the shaft.

He came up at dawn with his hair singed white at the temples and the hook still warm in his fist. The rose had gone dark, scorched to the grain. He kept it in his coat until he died, and every man in Hollin will swear the wings are still up there, taking the bad air out of the dark one breath at a time.