Flash sheet of black wing designs in silhouette, tribal and feathered styles, arranged in rows on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Wing designs flash sheet

Black and grey · Flash

A flash sheet arranged in many rows of wing designs, ranging from solid black silhouettes to feathered and tribal-style outlines. The designs are drawn in black on white, with some shown as solid shapes and others as linework with feather detail. The composition is dense and even, with each wing shown as a separate motif.

Wing Angel wing Feather Silhouette Tribal Flash sheet

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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

Mr Ashdown says I have the wrist for it now, which is why he let me do the long rows at the bottom of the board while he sulked over the lettering for the Co-operative. Sixty-two wings, he reckons, if you count the ones I've cut twice. I count them every night before I lock the workshop, because the number is the only thing in this trade that stays put.

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The sheet is for the fair at Hessle Road. Mr Ashdown wanted something a sailor could point at and say, that one, and a girl in a pinafore could say the same. So we did solid blacks like crows coming in to land, feathered ones with the quills drawn out like the teeth of a comb, and the looping sort the Indian cook at the Dock Tavern swears he saw painted on a wall in Bombay. Indian ink, good card, a dab of gum arabic so the lines lie flat and don't bleed.

Last Thursday a man came in with a creased photograph of a gull and asked if I could make a wing that looked like that and no other. I drew it wrong three times. The notch in the outer feather kept sliding off the page. In the end I set it bottom right, between a swirl and a plain black sweep, and wrote nothing under it. He looked at it a long while and said, that's the one, and paid in pennies he counted twice.

Mr Ashdown has pinned the sheet to the back wall, where the window light catches the gum and makes every wing look wet. I thought the notch was my small mistake, something I'd leave on the board for nobody to notice. But this morning I started a sixty-third wing, and I drew the notch again without meaning to, and then I sat and looked at it until the lamp needed trimming.