Black and grey wing tattoo across the ribs and an ornamental mandala-style tattoo on the back of the hand, with vertical lettering down the outer thigh.

Wing and mandala tattoos on a woman at the beach

Geometric · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A woman in a dark bikini stands in shallow water with her torso and legs visible, and her face is cropped out of the frame. A black and grey wing is tattooed across her ribs beneath the bust, and a dense mandala-style design covers the back of one hand and wrist. A line of vertical lettering runs down the outer thigh, and a small mark sits on the upper chest.

Geometric Lettering Ribs Hand Thigh Chest Wing Mandala Lettering Text

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

Sit closer, the fire has no wind to fight tonight. My grandmother's grandmother drove a water lorry along the Kessel road, the one that runs between the salt flats and the place where the sand swallows the telegraph poles. She carried a tin of ink and a bundle of paper, because the men at the wells paid her in favours and wanted their names written down.

Keep reading

One dry spring a boy came staggering off the track with his hand wrapped in a rag. He had been carrying a letter for a woman in the next valley, and a crow had torn the wrapping. What was left was a circle of coloured dots, a mandala the woman drew to show her sons the way home. The lorry woman traced it onto the back of the boy's hand with a brush, eight petals and a centre like a closed eye, and told him the road would follow the pattern if he kept his gaze on the middle.

He walked nine days. Each dusk the petals turned him a little, and each dawn a wing of cloud lifted off the dunes ahead, black at the edges and grey in the middle, and it showed him where the water pooled under the red rock. On the ninth day he found the woman at the cistern, reading the scraps of her own letter aloud to a goat, because nobody else was left to listen.

He never opened the letter he had carried. He did not need to. The wing had shown him the water, and the circle had shown him the way back to the lorry, where the old woman was waiting with her brush and a clean square of skin.