Black and grey realism tattoo of a winged figure with its head bowed and knees drawn up, above a skull, on the side of a ribcage.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Winged figure over a skull on the ribs

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A winged figure sits with its knees drawn up and its head bowed, arms wrapped around its legs, with feathered wings spreading above and around it. Below the figure, a large skull is shaded in grey tones and sits within the wing feathers. The tattoo is in black and grey with soft shading and fine outline work, and it wraps across the side of the ribs.

Realism Ribs Angel Wing Skull Figure Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bell at St Oswin's had been cracked since the flood of 1893, and Mrs Pargeter swore it still rang true enough to wake the dead on a Thursday. Her lodger, a clockmaker's apprentice named Tobias Lusk, did not believe her until the night he climbed the bell tower to fix the mechanism and found a figure already sitting in the rafters. It had folded its wings close around its knees and bowed its head as if listening for something far below. Beneath it, pale in the lantern light, lay a skull the size of a washing basket, its teeth worn smooth by the pigeons that roosted there.

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"You're late," the figure said, without lifting its head. Its voice was dry as chalk. "Every hundred years the city owes me one clock, and every hundred years the clockmaker's family pays with a boy."

Tobias had come to mend a single gear, not to bargain with the dead, so he said the first thing that occurred to him, which was that the Lusks had never owed anybody anything in their lives. The figure laughed, a sound like a drawer full of keys, and the skull's jaw dropped a fraction as though in agreement. He noticed then that the wings were not feathers at all but the pages of old ledgers, names inked along every quill, and that the one nearest his hand read Lusk, T., apprentice, 1871.

He mended the gear that night. In the morning the bell rang once, true and clean, and the ledger page had gone blank. Mrs Pargeter says the apprentice still climbs the tower on Thursdays, and that when the wind is right you can hear two voices arguing about the time.