Black and grey back tattoo of a winged angel, clouds and smoke on the shoulder blades, with script panels and sleeve work on the upper arms.

Winged angel and clouds across a back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A man is photographed from behind, showing a large black and grey back tattoo. A winged figure sits beneath a circular emblem on the left, while swirling clouds and smoke with feathered wings fill the right shoulder blade. Two vertical panels of script run down the back, framed by sleeve work on the upper arms.

Realism Japanese Back Shoulder Upper arm Angel Wing Cloud Smoke Script Figure Sleeve

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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

Sit closer, the fire wants feeding, and so do you. No, the third bell has not rung yet, that comes after the bread. Now, in the kingdom of Varrow Deep, where the river ran uphill on feast days, there lived a keeper called Ansel Corr who tended the great wind-gate above the salt flats. Every spring the gate had to be unlatched, and every autumn the clouds stored all winter in its iron ribs had to be let out over the fields, or the harvest would stay in the ground.

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Ansel had a sister, Maud, who could read the old letters cut into the gatepost, and she told him what they said: that a winged guardian sat beneath the sun-disc and held the weather in its lap, and that whoever disturbed it would have to carry the smoke of every burnt town on their shoulders. Ansel laughed at this. He laughed the winter the frost took the orchards, and he laughed the spring the gate jammed with cloud and the flats turned to dust.

On the morning he finally climbed the stairs to the gatepost, the guardian was not sitting. It was standing, its feathers grey with soot, and it held out its hands. Ansel understood that it wanted the weight back. So he took the smoke onto his own shoulders, feather by feather, until the whole sky lifted off the kingdom and went home.

Maud says the letters on the gatepost have changed since. Her name is cut there now, small, beneath the sun, and the wind has never once been late.