Full back tattoo of a colourful Japanese-style phoenix with flowing feathers wrapping around the back and side of the body.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Colourful phoenix back piece

Japanese · Back · Colour · Photo

A woman seen from behind shows a large back tattoo of a phoenix, with its head near the upper shoulder and long tail feathers curling down the side towards the hip. The linework is bold and the shading is smooth, with feathers built up in layers of red, orange, yellow, green and blue. The design fills most of the frame against a dark red backdrop.

Japanese Back Phoenix Feather Bird Back piece Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tomasz, the kingfisher finally came back to the bend below Hollin Lock, and I thought of you straight away, because you always said a bird that burns should not be allowed to land on anything so grey as a barge roof. I have kept the Mary Ellen moving the way you left her, bow up, coal in the cabin, the brass kettle polished for no one. Mrs Okafor at the lock keeper's cottage asked after you twice. She has a nephew who sells paint in Stoke and says the reds they mix now are wrong, too loud, like a fire that has forgotten what it is for.

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Last Thursday the water came up brown after the rain and I tied off early. In the cabin I found the old tin of wax you used on the tiller, and underneath it the drawing you made on the back of a tide table, the bird with its neck arched back and its long feathers unspooling in orange, yellow, green, and that blue you swore you had mixed from a bruise. I sat on the bunk with it until the lamp guttered. Then I went out on the towpath with a jam jar of river water and a rag, and I scrubbed the whole port side of the hull, slow, until the paint came up bright under the grime.

It looks very fine. I am not sure you would approve of how fine. The feathers curl round the cabin side now the way they curled on your paper, and when the sun drops behind the poplars the phoenix seems to lift its head from the hull and look downstream, the way you used to when you wanted to be going somewhere without me. I have decided I will go too, as far as Cropredy, and you can rage about it when you get back. Keep the matches dry. Your friend, Ines