Grid of six flash sheets showing black and grey wing tattoo designs in varied feather patterns, with one small red splatter motif.

Wing designs flash sheet

Mixed · Flash

The image is a six-panel grid of wing designs, ranging from outlined feather-layered wings to solid black silhouettes. Most panels use black linework, hatching and grey shading, with some panels showing bold filled shapes. A small red splatter appears in one panel, which adds the only colour to the sheet.

Wing Feather Angel wing Silhouette Splatter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and mind the bench, it has older splinters than your grandmothers. You want the story of Tobias Crane and his wings? Everyone on Harrowgate Walk knew about those wings before they knew about Tobias. He was a glazier's boy who swept the gravel of the Dalloway garden every Thursday, and he had a habit of standing still beside the yew hedge with his arms held a little from his sides, as if the air might decide to lift him.

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Mrs Ruth Penhallow kept the potting shed behind the orangery, and in it a rack of feathers she had gathered for thirty years: jackdaw, heron, a grey goose bought at a market in Penzance. She drew him a pattern on brown paper, rows of feathers laid like slates on a roof, each one dark at the root and paling to a clean edge. 'Wings are only feathers that have agreed to work together,' she told him, and she charged him a shilling and a jar of quince jelly.

He spent the whole winter stitching them onto a frame of willow and copper wire. By March the frost had come off the glass, and he climbed the garden wall at dusk with the wings strapped to his back, black as the paper cut-outs for the children's puppet show. He leapt, and for one breath the rooks above the lawn turned to watch him. Then he dropped into the rhubarb bed, and a single bead of red from a grazed knuckle spotted the white gravel like a wax seal.

Ruth came out with a pot of tea and found the wings folded neatly on the bench, every feather in its row. Tobias was limping down the lane on his own two feet, with one grey feather tucked behind his ear. He kept it all his life. Every spring after, he walked the wall at dusk with his arms out, the rooks still turned to watch, and the air, as far as anyone could tell, never quite made up its mind.