Colour traditional tattoo of a winged golden ball with a lightning bolt mark, a green cloud and four-point stars, on an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Winged golden ball with stars on arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A winged golden ball with a lightning bolt mark sits on a small green cloud, with four-point stars around it. Bold black outlines define the wings and ball, with yellow and brown shading and flat green on the cloud. The tattoo is centred on the arm against a blurred indoor background.

Traditional Upper arm Wing Lightning bolt Cloud Star

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

Nell had been chasing the thing since the lock at Cold Harbour Bottom, and it had been working harder than she was at not being caught. It was no bigger than a plum and gold as a wedding ring left out in the sun. Every time her fist closed, it slipped sideways on two quick wings and left behind a smell of wet pennies and a scatter of sparks that fizzled out over the water.

Keep reading

Her grandfather steered the narrowboat Wren from the tiller and said nothing through three locks. At the fourth he lit his pipe, looked up at the bank of low grey cloud snagged on the willows, and told her the thing would only land on something that wasn't trying to hold it. You could not grab a bird that was flying, he said. You had to be the sort of thing it wanted to sit on.

So she climbed onto the cabin roof with a heel of bread in her palm, flat and still, and waited while her arm went numb. The ball circled the chimney twice, its lightning mark flashing like a struck match. Then it dropped towards the mist that had come down off the cloud, a little green wisp hanging just above the cut, and folded its wings and settled on it as neatly as a cup on a saucer.

Nell did not close her hand. She watched it rest there, breathing with the cloud, until the wings lifted again on their own. It rose past the willows, found the first star of the evening, and blinked there with the others. Behind her, her grandfather knocked out his pipe on the rail and said, to nobody in particular, that she had the knack now.