Realistic black and grey angel statue tattoo with teal background covering the upper arm and shoulder, shown on a person in a maroon sleeveless top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Winged stone angel on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A large realistic tattoo of a seated winged angel statue, with the figure's head, drapery and feathered wings rendered in soft greys. A teal-green background behind the statue adds the only strong colour, and the shading gives the carved stone a weathered, three-dimensional look. The design fills the upper arm and extends towards the shoulder, with the figure's feet cropped at the lower edge.

Realism Upper arm Shoulder Angel Statue Wing Drapery

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 quarry at Hessel Fell gave up its white stone only in winter, when the frost split the seams, and that was the winter Master Corin sent me up the scree to find the block for the Queen's angel. I was sixteen and had never cut anything larger than a gatepost. He gave me a chisel with a bone handle and told me the angel would sit, not stand, because a seated thing is patient and the dead have time.

Keep reading

We spent two years on her. The head came first, carved from a lump the colour of old milk, and when Corin set it on the shoulders he went quiet and then swore at me for leaving the mouth too stern. I softened it the next morning with a rasp and a wet cloth, and he said nothing, which was how I knew it was right. The wings took the longest. Each feather was a thumbnail's depth, and the light off the chapel's green copper dome came through the east window and made them look as though they were still settling.

The Queen died before the angel was set. The chapel council wanted her seated under the dome, against a wall the colour of the sea at dusk, and Corin said that was fitting, though he never explained why. On the morning we lifted her into place, a pigeon flew out of the rafters and landed on the drapery, and nobody moved it for an hour.

Now I am older than Corin was when he died, and the chapel is mostly weeds. The angel still sits with her hands folded over one knee, looking down the nave as though someone is late. Each year I climb up with a cloth and wipe the green lichen from her feet, and I leave the wings alone, since they were the part I was proudest of and the part nobody ever looks at.