Colour and black and grey Japanese style tattoo of a large bird with red flames and maple leaves across a shoulder and upper arm.

Japanese bird and maple leaves on upper arm

Japanese · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

A large bird with spread wings and long trailing tail feathers fills the shoulder and upper arm, shown in black and grey shading with scale-like texture on its body. Red flame shapes rise behind the bird, with red and green maple leaves and touches of blue set among grey clouds or smoke. The design wraps around the curve of the shoulder and down the arm, with the figure framed by the arm's contours.

Japanese Shoulder Upper arm Bird Feather Maple leaf Flame Cloud Scale

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 maple by the chapel had gone red a fortnight early that year, and my mother said it was the smoke getting into the roots. We stood at the pit head with our shawls over our heads while the cage stayed at the bottom, and nobody would say the word rescue out loud because it made the men look at their boots.

Keep reading

Something moved above the winding gear. It was grey at first, then the colour of rust, a bird with its wings thrown wide and its long tail pouring down behind it like a skirt of ash. Mrs Dobbs swore it was a heron. Old Harry Lowe said it was a crane, the kind painted on the tea chests that came up from Yokohama. Red showed through its feathers where the flames caught the light, and then it folded and dropped into the shaft mouth as neatly as a stitch going through cloth.

The cage came up at four. Davy was on it, black to the eyes and coughing, and he would not stop talking about a bird with a tail like a bride's train that had sat on the cage roof the whole way up, warm as a kettle lid. Nobody believed him until they saw the leaves caught in his collar, red and green, from a tree that does not grow within twenty miles of the coal face.

I kept one of those leaves pressed in my Bible for years. It has gone brittle now, but the red has held, and when I tip it towards the lamp I can still see the veins fanning out like the feathers of something that did not have to come down at all.