Black and grey drawing of two feathered wings meeting at a heart, surrounded by ornamental swirls, shown as a tattoo design on a peach background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Winged heart with ornamental scrollwork design

Black and grey · Flash

A detailed drawing of two feathered wings rising from a central heart, with fine curling scrollwork extending around and below the motif. The feathers and wings are rendered with shaded, hatched linework in black and grey, while the swirls are drawn as thin, flowing lines. The design is centred on a plain peach background with no body part visible.

Wing Heart Feather Swirl Scrollwork

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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 last poster I painted for Gallagher's Travelling Circus was the winged heart, and Mrs Vane sent it back twice before she would pay for it. The wings were too heavy, she said. Nobody wanted to see a bird that could not lift off a painted board. So I took my finest brush and a tin of black gouache and hatched every feather until the wings looked like they had weather in them.

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The circus was dying the way old acts do, slowly, one town at a time. The elephant had gone to a sanctuary in Wales. The high-wire rig rusted behind the cookhouse. Our aerialist, Ada Pell, had taken a teaching post in Hull and only came back on Sundays to watch the lights go out. She was the one who drew the swirls around the heart, thin curling lines that ran off the edges of the board like smoke off a snuffed candle.

On the last night in Scarborough the big top leaked and the wind got under the canvas. We sat in the van with the posters rolled across our knees and listened to the rain. Ada took the wing sketch from my hands, traced one scroll with her finger, and said a heart with wings was just a heart that had given up on staying put.

Next morning the poster went up in the chip shop window on Foreshore Road, the only glass in town that still caught the light. Somebody would stop for it, I thought. Somebody always did. The paint was still tacky when the first bus pulled in, and the paper stirred a little when the sea wind came up the street, as if it meant to fly.