Black tribal-style design of an ornate cross framed by spiky, feathered wings on a white background, shown as a flash drawing.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Winged cross tribal design

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A bold black design shows an ornate cross at the centre, with a pattern of decorative detail along its arms and stem. Large, sweeping tribal wings with pointed, flame-like tips extend symmetrically from either side of the cross. The linework is solid black on a plain white background, with no shading, and the composition is centred and symmetrical.

Blackwork Cross Wing Tribal

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

The big top was already sagging when you arrived at the fairground in Kettering, its canvas gone the colour of weak tea, and the man at the gate told you the show would not be opening for much longer. You did not mind. You had been sent to sweep the sawdust out of the menagerie tent and to count the ropes, and the ropes were the only thing in the place that still seemed certain of its purpose. Mrs Oddie, who had flown the trapeze for thirty summers before her shoulders gave out, took one look at your broom and handed you a brass-cornered box instead. Inside lay a fretwork cross, black with tarnish, that had once topped the tent pole in her husband's time. She wanted it polished before the auction men came on Thursday.

Keep reading

It took you three evenings under a paraffin lamp. The cross had two wings of wire and tin cut into feathers that flared at the tips like something burning, and every pitted groove had to be scraped clean with a bent nail. On the last night the rain came through the seams and drummed on the canvas above you, and you realised the wings were not decoration at all but a way of holding the cross steady in a wind. Mrs Oddie, watching from her camp chair with a rug over her knees, said nothing until you had finished. Then she asked whether you would like to keep it.

You said no. You said it was hers. She laughed, a sound like a rope paying out through a pulley, and told you that the auctioneers would never pay for a thing that had been loved this well. On Thursday the tent came down in sections and the cross went into the van beside her, its wings catching the light as it bumped over the potholes out of town. You watched until the lane bent behind a hedge, and then you went back to sweeping, because someone still had to.