Crouching winged gargoyle tattoo on an upper arm, shaded in black and grey with a blue torn-skin background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Winged gargoyle on an upper arm

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A crouching winged gargoyle with clawed hands and feet fills the centre of the design, with its wings spread wide above it. The figure is shaded in greys and dark tones with fine detail on the face, wings and muscles. Blue ink forms a ripped-skin background behind the figure, and the whole tattoo sits on the outer upper arm.

Upper arm Wing Claw Torn skin

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 stone thing came down off the church roof in the hard week before Christmas, when the beck had frozen to its bed and the ewes were lambing in the snow. Nobody saw it leave. Ruth Haldane found its prints in the frost of the byre yard, long and feathered at the ends, and a single claw mark on the gatepost where it had gripped to steady itself.

Keep reading

It had no wish to be seen. By day it crouched on the midden wall, grey as the slates, and at dusk it went into the barn and sat on the hay bales with its wings folded over its head like a man sheltering from rain. When a fox got into the hen house it went after the fox over the orchard wall and came back with feathers in its teeth and the fox nowhere to be found. Ruth left bread and a dish of milk on the step. Each morning the dish was licked clean.

Then the snow shut the lane, and the lamb pen took a fever. Ruth's husband Tom had gone to the market at Kendal and not come back. The gargoyle went out into the blizzard on its long legs, wings clapping, and returned with the vet's bag hooked in its claws, though no vet had been sent for. Ruth never asked how it knew. She asked only why it had left the church at all, and the thing looked at her with its stone face for a long while before it answered that the roof had grown too cold to keep a watch from.

In March it climbed back up the tower, slow and stiff, and the bells rang over the valley. Ruth kept the dish on the step all the same. Some mornings it was empty, and some mornings a single grey feather lay floating in the milk.