Woman seen from behind with a large black and grey back tattoo of a flame-haired figure and a bird, plus an eye of Horus on her upper arm.

Large back piece and eye on upper arm

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman wearing a tan hat and a backless peach dress stands facing a white curtain, showing her back. The large back piece includes a figure with flowing, flame-like hair and a bird design on the left side, drawn with shaded black and grey linework. An eye of Horus is visible on her upper arm, and the soft daylight lights the even composition.

Back Upper arm Woman Flame Bird Eye of horus Figure

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

Brother Anselm has been dead nine years, and still I hear him sniffing at the lamp whenever the ink goes wrong. The abbot gave me the bestiary in the autumn of my second year, a calfskin book with a bird on its first page that was already burning when the old painter laid it down. He told me to finish what the dead hand had begun: the phoenix, the heron, and the flaming woman who stood for the morning star in the old glosses.

Keep reading

I was a poor copyist. My letters leaned like drunk men. But the bird came easily, because I had watched the sky over the fens every dawn for a decade and knew how a wing folds when it means to drop. What I could not do was the woman. Her hair kept turning to smoke, then to a fox's tail, then to a river. Each morning I scraped it back to the vellum, and each night I dreamt of a girl at the ferry who had told me that fire never burns the one who asks it.

On the feast of Saint Brendan the rain stopped, and the whole house went out to the cloister to watch the swifts. I stayed at my desk with the lamp guttering. I took the finest brush, dipped it in lamp-black with a thin wash of ash, and let the hair go wild without asking it where to end. The strokes shaded from grey to black, like a storm drawing back over the water.

When the abbot came to check the work, he held the page to the window for a long time. Then he said only, "Now she is looking at the bird," and went out to ring for Vespers. I have never understood him, and I have stopped trying.