Black linework flash sheet on tracing paper showing a winged figure with a horned headdress, a braided-hair figure with wings, and a mandala-style design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Winged figure flash designs on tracing paper

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

Several black ink flash drawings sit on overlapping sheets of tracing paper. The main subjects are a winged figure with a horned headdress and outstretched wings, a figure with long braided hair and feathered wings, and a dark mandala-style piece with dotted detail. The linework is fine and detailed, with some grey shading and stippled dots, and there is no colour.

Fine line Geometric Winged figure Wing Mandala Dot Crescent moon Lace pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, the cake will keep. You want the rest of it, you have to hush for it. My Nan's sister, Ivy, could draw wings the way other women could bake. Every Friday she laid sheets of tracing paper across the kitchen table, one over another, so the drawing underneath showed through like a ghost, and she went over it in black ink until the feathers looked ready to lift the table off the floor.

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The summer she was courting Frank Doyle from the lock-keeper's cottage, she drew a woman with a moon sat on her head, horns curled round it like a ram's, and she said that was the one who decided when the river should flood. Frank laughed and said the river took no orders from a moon. Ivy said the river took orders from nobody, which was why she'd married a man who knew how to row.

Then the wedding night came, and the rain came with it, and the lock filled to the top. Frank was out on the water in the dark, hauling a barge through. Ivy sat up with her pencil and a fresh sheet, and she drew the one with the braids down her back and feathers where her arms should be, holding a dark lace of stars over the whole canal. She said she had never drawn anything so fast.

Frank came in at dawn with river weed in his boots and the water gone down. He found the tracing paper stuck to the window, the wings pressed flat against the glass, the ink still wet on the moon. Ivy said it was only a sketch. Frank said he'd seen the feathers from the towpath, and that was how he knew which way to steer. Now raise your glasses to the newlyweds, and mind the lock on the way home.