Large black and grey realism tattoo across a person's back showing a bearded winged figure with a staff above a crouching horned figure, with lettering across the top.

Winged figure and kneeling demon on a back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large back piece shows a bearded, winged figure holding a staff, leaning over a muscular horned figure who kneels beneath it. The scene sits among soft clouds, with feathered wings rising on the right and a lettered banner across the top. The shading is smooth and detailed in black and grey, with strong contrast on the musculature and feathers.

Realism Back Angel Winged figure Staff Demon Horn Cloud Feather Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody expected Mr Haskell to come to the reunion, least of all with his wings folded under a borrowed grey coat. He had taught the class of 1987 at the old Lowther Road school, and he had taught them with a cane he never used, only lifted now and then the way a conductor lifts a baton. Now he stood by the tombola in the village hall with his beard combed out, and the sausage rolls went soft in their trays while the women from the church hall pretended not to stare.

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Dennis Pryce came in last, hands in his pockets, still wearing the same jumper he had worn for twenty years on the scrap yard. Everyone remembered him as Ram, the boy who had been kept behind on a wet Friday while the whole class listened through the door to the shouting and nobody went in. He walked straight across the hall and stopped a yard from the old teacher, the way you stop at a dog you do not know.

The old people of Thwaite used to say that a teacher who keeps a child in must sit with that child until the crying stops, or else the teacher carries the crying home for the rest of his days. Haskell had not sat with anyone. He had gone home and left the lamp on in the classroom all night, and the lamp was still on when the caretaker found it. "I should have gone in," he said. Dennis looked at the floor and then at the wings, which were heavier than he had imagined, and grey at the tips like weather over the moor.

Nobody saw what passed between them after that. Dennis took a long feather from the lining of Haskell's coat, turned it once in the light from the hatch, and laid it on the trestle table beside the raffle tickets. The coat still hangs on the hook by the fire door at Thwaite hall every reunion, and the feather is still in its pocket, and nobody has ever asked whose it was.