Full-colour neo-traditional phoenix tattoo with spread wings and a long tail of feathers, placed across the upper back.

Colourful phoenix across upper back

Neo-trad · Back · Colour · Photo

A phoenix with wings spread wide and a long, trailing tail is shown in bold black outlines. The feathers are rendered in yellow, orange, red, blue and green, with soft shading that gives the wings and tail depth. The bird fills most of the frame against plain skin, and the tail ends in eye-like feather tips.

Neo-trad Back Phoenix Bird Wing Feather Tail feather

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 apple pickers had stopped for the heat, but the old woman at the end of the row was still shaking the Bramley when the bird came down out of the smoke above the hill. No one had seen smoke that August. The bird folded its wings like a fan being shut, and its tail dropped behind it in long streamers, blue and green and yellow, each tip opening into an eye that looked over the orchard as if counting the trees.

Keep reading

Her son Tomas said it was a kite caught on a pylon. His wife said it was the Bramley's doing, since the tree had blossomed twice that year. The old woman set down her basket and walked out between the rows until she stood close enough to see the sea-green rims of the feathers and the slate-coloured eyes at their ends.

"You've come a long way for windfalls," she said.

The bird spoke in the voice of a kettle coming to the boil. Every hundred years, it said, it burned to ash in the hollow of the orchard wall and rose again, and for each rising it asked one thing: the first apple of the season, eaten by someone who would waste nothing. The old woman took the Bramley from her apron pocket, bit it, ate the core as well, and held out the rest. The bird took the fruit from her palm and seemed well pleased.

In the morning the wall hollow held only grey ash, but three saplings stood up through it, none of them planted by anyone. Tomas's wife found a single feather tucked into the old woman's apron, red at the root, its eye-tip blinking slowly at the light before it went back to counting.