Full back tattoo of a red and gold phoenix with flowing feathers and peacock eye details, in Japanese style, covering the back.

Full back phoenix tattoo in red and gold

Japanese · Back · Colour · Photo

A large phoenix covers most of the back, its head turned over the left shoulder with a gold beak and white eye, and its long tail feathers sweeping down towards the lower back. The linework is bold with smooth colour blending in reds, oranges and yellows, and darker shading gives the feathers depth. Purple and orange peacock-style feather eyes appear at the base, framing the composition against bare skin.

Japanese Back Phoenix Bird Feather Peacock feather Flame

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ash was still warm on the stone when you reached the ridge above Hollin Cross, boots slipping on pine needles, the smell of scorched resin following you up through the trees like a dog that would not be sent home. Mrs Abernethy had said the bird would be in the old fir stand, where the lightning struck last August. She had said it the way she said everything, as if reading out the price of eggs.

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Nothing moved at first. Then the bracken ahead began to glow, not with flame but with a colour the wood had forgotten, copper and saffron laid over the trunks like wet paint. A tail feather unspooled through the branches, rust-red, its tip an eye of violet that opened and looked at you without blinking. The bird settled on a broken limb, turned its gold beak over its left shoulder, and studied the village below, its roofs no bigger than dropped buttons.

"You've come for the ash," it said, in a voice like a bellows worked slowly by someone very old.

You had not come for ash. Your sister's loaves had gone flat for a fortnight and the well had turned bitter, and everyone in Hollin said the bird kept the old bargains. You opened your mouth to say so, and it lifted one wing. The whole sky behind it caught, fire rolled down the slope towards the houses, and you heard the shutters of every cottage bang open at once.

It did not burn them. The flames pooled in the lanes and lit the lamps one by one, the way a hand passes a candle down a line of children. When the last window glowed, the bird plucked a single feather from its breast, warm as new bread, and pressed it into your palm. "Light the oven with this," it said. "Bring it back when it has gone out."