Black and grey Japanese style dragon and phoenix tattoo covering the full back, with the dragon coiling over the right shoulder and the phoenix spreading its wings on the left.

Dragon and phoenix across a back

Japanese · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large black and grey tattoo of a dragon coiling over the right shoulder and a phoenix with spread wings on the left, both covering most of the upper and mid back. The linework is bold and the scales and feathers are shaded with fine grey gradients, giving depth. The photograph is taken straight on, with the head cropped out and no face visible.

Japanese Back Dragon Phoenix Bird Scale Feather Wing

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 dragon had lived under the reservoir at Hollin Dale since the valley was drowned, and in all that time nobody had seen the water go still enough to show him. Mrs Abernethy, who kept the sluice gate, swore she saw his back break the surface each November, scales like wet slate, and that the phoenix came down to the spillway the same week to pick ash from between the stones.

Keep reading

The phoenix, called Ismay by the village children who threw her crusts, had burnt out of the old mill three summers before and had never quite settled. Each dawn she rose over the dam with her wings spread as wide as a drying sheet, and each dusk she came back trailing smoke from her tail. The dragon watched her from the deep and said nothing, because a dragon who speaks first has already lost the argument.

The rains came early that October. The reservoir climbed a yard in a night, and the sluice jammed with a fallen oak, its roots still wearing clay. Ismay could not fly low enough through the downpour to shift it, and the dragon could not reach the gate without breaking the surface into the cold air. So he came up anyway, coiled round the concrete column, and set his shoulder to the timber until it groaned and rolled. Ismay caught the last log in her talons and flung it onto the bank, and both of them were soaked and steaming when the water began to fall.

In the morning neither spoke. The level had dropped a foot, and on the spillway stones lay a single grey feather, and beside it a scale the size of a palm, each left where the other would find it. Mrs Abernethy wrote them both into her ledger under weather, and under that, in smaller writing, that the gate had held.