Large black and grey tattoo of a winged figure with a red watercolour-style splash, across the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Winged figure with red splash on back

Back · Mixed · Photo

A woman's upper back carries a large tattoo of a winged figure, with outstretched black and grey wings and a standing silhouette at the centre. Soft, feathered shading and loose, sketchy edges give the wings a painterly quality. Red ink splashes behind the figure and down the lower section add the only colour to an otherwise monochrome composition.

Back Winged figure Wing Silhouette Watercolour Woman

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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 paint had been bought for the boathouse door, but by the second morning Ines Carrow had lost patience with the door and was working on the harbour wall instead. Nobody on Scarrow Island had asked her to. The ferryman watched from his step with a mug going cold in his hands and said nothing, which on Scarrow counted as approval.

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She began with the wings because they were the part of the figure that wouldn't sit still. Black, dragged fast with a dry brush, so the feathers frayed at their ends like smoke off a wet fire. The body she left for last. Every time she came back to it the shape had shifted a little, as if it had heard her coming down the lane and thought better of being seen.

The red she mixed from the last of the madder root her grandmother had kept in a jar. It ran where it liked, down the stones in thin rusted threads, and by noon the wall looked less like a painting than like something that had been struck and was still bleeding politely. Ines stood back with her arms folded. The gulls had stopped arguing over the bins.

When the tide came in that evening the ferryman walked the length of the quay, stopped at the wall and touched one black feather with a wet thumb. It came away on his skin. He looked up at the figure, then out at the empty water, and for the first time in forty years of crossing to the mainland he didn't count the sailings. He just nodded, as if someone had finally answered a question he had been asking since childhood.