Black and grey tattoos of wings across a man's back and shoulder, with script on the shoulder blade and a detailed sleeve on the upper arm, photographed from behind.

Winged back piece and arm sleeve

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A shirtless man is photographed from behind, showing a large black and grey back piece of wings spread across the upper back and shoulders. A block of cursive script sits on the shoulder blade, and the arm carries a dense sleeve of leaves and other shaded foliage. The soft, even studio lighting shows the tonal shading clearly against a plain cream background.

Back Shoulder Upper arm Forearm Wing Feather Script Quote Leaves Sleeve Back piece

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been coming down on the covered market since the bells for nine, and Nell Fairbrother had sold only two feathers and a pear. She sat under her green awning with a lap desk and a tin of ink gone thick in the cold, waiting for custom, which in that weather meant a soaked stranger who wanted a letter he could not write himself.

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He came at eleven, shoulders hunched against the drip, and asked for something to send to a sister in Hull. He would not say what had happened between them, and Nell did not ask. She took a sheet of laid paper, dipped her nib, and wrote the line he gave her in the slanting hand her mother had beaten into her: let us dream of the wind that carries us home. Then she asked what he meant by home, and he laughed and told her about a rowing boat and a father who never once looked back at the shore.

When the ink dried she folded the letter into a bird, the way her grandmother had taught her, and tucked two pheasant feathers into its back for wings. Between the pages she pressed a sprig of ivy she had been keeping for luck. The man turned it over in his big wet hands as if it might fly off without him, then paid her a shilling he could not spare and walked out into the grey.

The letter went out on the post van the next morning. Nell never learned whether the sister read it. She only knew that the rain stopped at four, that the market lamps came on one by one, and that the stall beside hers still kept a small pot of ivy by the till, which it has never once sold.