Back view of a person on a beach with a black and grey winged tattoo centred on the back, a geometric chevron design between the wings, and tattoos on the extended arm and forearm.

Winged back tattoo on a beach

Geometric · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a person seen from behind on a windy beach, with long dark hair blowing across the frame. A large winged design covers the upper back, with feathered wing shapes on either side of a central geometric chevron panel. The linework and shading are bold and mostly black and grey, with some warmer brown tones in the feathers, and the teal bikini band and grey stormy sky sit behind the figure.

Geometric Back Upper arm Forearm Wing Feather Chevron Geometric Armband Beach Sea Hair

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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 nearer the fire, all of you, and mind the cat. This one is a back-of-the-neck sort of tale, the kind that lifts the hair on your arms. The gale came up off Skerrow Bay on the last day of August, when the barley was already in and the gulls had gone quiet.

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Marta Hollis, who mended nets for the Sayer brothers, saw the cloud standing up over the headland like a wall that had been built overnight. Her brother Tam was still out past the skerries with the crab pots. She tied a length of tarred rope round her left arm, twice, the way her grandmother had taught her to tie a boat to a ring, and she went down the slip in her father's old oilskin, the one with the black chevron panel stitched down the spine and the feathers worked in brown thread on either side of it.

The wind took her hair and flung it sideways. Spray came over the mole in sheets, and she could see nothing of the boat, only white where the water should have been. Then came a thin whistle through the rigging, and she understood the wind was not off the sea at all but pouring down from the cloud. Her father always said a storm was a bird that had lost its way and needed someone to point it home. So she stood at the end of the mole, flung both arms out as far as they would go, and shouted at the sky the way you would call a dog in off a field.

The gale hesitated, the way a dog does when it hears its name. Tam's boat came round the skerry on the last of the light, rolling, with him bailing and singing out of tune. She never remembered afterwards how she got home. She only knew the rope had burned a band into her arm, and the feathers on the oilskin had lifted and settled. The storm, when it finally came in that night, went over the village and found nothing left to take.