Flash sheet of seven winged ball designs in black and grey linework, with one bottom-right version shaded in gold and brown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Winged ball flash sheet

Mixed · Flash

The sheet shows seven drawings of a small round ball with feathered wings, arranged in a loose grid on a white background. Most are black and grey linework with hatching, stippling, swirling patterns or bold striped wings, while one at the bottom left has pale grey wings and a brown ball. The bottom-right design is the only one with colour, shaded in gold and yellow with brown tones.

Wing Sphere Feather Flash sheet

Find an artist for this

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 stove, the lamp won't be lit for an hour and the wind takes the warmth out of a body quick. You want the tale of the ball that lived in the lamp room at Skerryvane, or you want your tea first? Tea first, then. Mrs Gorrie kept the kettle on in those days, and her husband Andrew kept the lamp, and the two of them were never once in a room together without a row about the brass.

Keep reading

The ball came in a crate of Dutch lenses the winter of 1911. It was no bigger than a plum and it had two wings folded flat against its sides, feathered in silver lines so fine you could see the sea through them. It would not sit still on the bench. It hummed like a kettle thinking about boiling, and when Andrew held it up to the window the wings opened a crack and shut again. Mrs Gorrie said it was a bad omen. Andrew said it was only a gull's egg from the Atlantic. Neither of them was right, and both of them knew it.

One January night the gale tore the storm shutter loose, and the ball got out. The keeper's boy saw it go up through the glass dome, wings beating, a small bright thing dodging the beam over the reef. Every vessel that came in that night followed it, because the ball flew ahead of the light and the light followed the ball. The lamp had been dim for a month, and it was the ball that had been burning.

In the morning Andrew climbed the stair and found it on the gallery rail, wings folded, cold as a pebble from the shore. He put it in his coat pocket and said nothing to the Board. If you go out on the gallery at dusk, you'll still see it, folding itself at the rail, waiting for the dark that needs it.