Full colour Japanese style phoenix tattoo with blue body, purple and green wings and orange tail feathers across a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Colourful phoenix across a back

Japanese · Back · Colour · Photo

A large phoenix fills the upper back, with a blue body, purple and green wing feathers and a flowing orange and red tail that curls down towards the lower back. The linework is bold with smooth colour blending and dark shading behind the bird, and orange and red feathers spread out across the shoulder blade. Framed tattoo artwork hangs on the wall behind, and the shot is taken from above the shoulder.

Japanese Neo-trad Back Phoenix Bird Feather Wing Tail feather Peacock feather

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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 fire started in the bunting, not the kitchen, which is the first thing you tell the insurance man and the last thing anyone believes. By the time you had your aunt out of the marquee, the sky over Pendeen was the colour of a bruise, and the best man was still reading the speech cards aloud to nobody. You do not remember deciding to go back in. You remember the heat on the back of your neck and the sound the poles made, like someone clearing their throat.

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Inside, the tables had gone up like paper lanterns. Your mother's peacock feather fan, the one she carried down the aisle at her own wedding thirty years before, lay on the grass where you had dropped it. You picked it up because it was the only thing in reach that still felt cool. Its eyes were all there, green and gold, watching you as if you had done something foolish.

Then the blue bird came up out of the smoke above the cliff path. It was not a real bird, and everyone there knew it, but it came over the rope fence with its wings held high and its long orange tail dragging ash across the lawn, and the guests who had been screaming went quiet. It did not go for the marquee. It landed on the stone wall beside the cake and turned its head towards the one tier that had survived, the sugar roses scorched brown at the edges.

Afterwards people argued about whether it was the floodlights, or the wine, or the smoke. Your sister married the baker on the Monday in the church hall, and she wore your mother's fan in her hair. The feather that came loose in the fire is still in your coat pocket. It shimmers when you walk past a shop window, and you have never once thrown it away.