Solid black winged emblem with a central triangle and circle tattooed on the upper back, in a blackwork style.

Winged triangle emblem on upper back

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black tattoo of a winged emblem with a central upward-pointing triangle and a circular element within it sits on the upper back. The shapes are filled with flat black ink with crisp edges and no shading, and the wing rays and lower points extend outwards. The skin around it is lightly reddened and the image is taken from behind, showing only the back of the neck and shoulder.

Blackwork Back Emblem Wing Triangle Circle Crest

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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 road out of Tarrow Flats gives up its tarmac by the forty-second milestone, and after that you are following nothing but the tyre ruts of the last lorry and your own nerve. The jerrycans knock against the tailgate. Dust hangs behind you like a flag that won't come down. The depot man told you to look for the stone with the wings, because the wings point the way once the sun drops, and you have laughed at him twice already this morning.

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It is there at a bend where the rock folds in on itself, a slab the height of a man's knee, cut flat and blackened with something that might be tar or might be a century of weather. Three shapes sit on it: a triangle standing on its point, with a wide spread of rays either side, like a bird that has forgotten how to fly and decided to stand very still. Inside the triangle someone has scratched a ring with a smaller ring within it, and the ring is turned a hair off true, so that when you crouch and sight along it the sand beyond seems to tilt.

You follow the tilt for an hour. The ground goes from grit to pale clay to a dry bed where the stones are the colour of old teeth. Then there is a steel cover set flush in the earth, its hand-wheel rusted shut, and under your boot a faint hollow note that means cistern, not rock. Your water is nearly gone. You kneel, scrape the rim of the cover with your thumbnail, and the rust comes away in a curl as neat as a shaving.

Behind you the wind lifts the dust off the road, and the stone keeps its arms out, pointing the way you have already come. You put your weight into the wheel. It gives on the third try, and the cool breath that rises smells of iron and rain, from a country that has not been asked for either in a very long time.