Black and grey blackwork tattoo of an ornate bird with a long feathered tail, placed on the back.

Ornate bird with feathered tail on the back

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A stylised bird with a curled crest and long, sweeping wing is drawn in bold solid black and fine line work. Its trailing tail feathers are filled with hatched strokes and dotted eye shapes that fade into lighter greys toward the lower edge. The design fills the frame diagonally on pale skin with no colour ink.

Blackwork Dotwork Back Bird Phoenix Feather Peacock feather Wing Tail Crest

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 last bird on the Halloran Brothers' bill was a painted cockatoo that nobody had fed properly since spring, and Tessa Quill knew it the moment she carried the tent poles through the mud at Saltburn. The big top sagged in the middle like a tired horse. Her brother Dane was already on the ladder, shouting figures at the ticket man who was not listening.

Keep reading

The bird had come from a sale in Hull, bought off a sailor who swore it could say its own name. It could not. What it could do was spread its tail in the ring under the one working spotlight, and for three evenings running the children in the cheap seats had gone quiet. Tessa had sewn the paper fans for that trick herself, cutting each feather from old ledger pages and pricking the eyes with a darning needle, forty of them, until her thumbs bled into the paste.

On the last night the generator failed halfway through the act. In the dark the bird unfurled anyway, a slow black fan against the canvas, and the crowd heard the wings rather than saw them. Tessa stood by the rigging and counted the eyes she could still make out, one, two, eleven, until the lamp came back and there were only the rows of empty seats and the muddy ring, and the bird folding itself neatly on its perch as if none of it had mattered.