Colour tattoo of a phoenix in red, orange and yellow with black shading, spanning a person's lower back, with a small heart below it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Phoenix across the lower back

Neo-trad · Back · Colour · Photo

A large phoenix with its wings spread and head turned to the side fills the lower back, its long feathers drawn with flowing lines. The shading moves from deep red and black at the edges to bright orange and yellow at the head and wing tips. A small outlined heart sits low near the jeans waistband, and a partly visible tattoo appears at the top left edge.

Neo-trad Back Phoenix Bird Feather Heart

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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

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the lamp before someone's eyebrows go the way of Tomas Reilly's. Right. You want the bird. Everyone asks for the bird when the wind's dropped and the sea's gone flat as a pewter plate.

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It was the autumn we left Bristol with a hold full of salt cod and a cook who measured his rum by the thimble. Three weeks out, the galley chimney caught, and by the time the bucket brigade had the fire pinned down, it had eaten the bread store and most of the rigging on the port side. We were all for the boats. Captain Hale stood on the quarterdeck with his hat in his fist and said nothing at all, which was worse.

Then the smoke lifted, and there it was, perched on the mainmast truck with its wings open wider than the yard. Feathers the colour of a forge when you pull the bellows hard, red at the root, gold at the tips, and black where the flame had burned down to ash. It turned its head to look at us, slow as a magistrate, and then it stretched out over the water and took the whole sky with it.

It did not stay. Birds never do. But the next morning the rigging was whole, the bread store was full of bread, and the cook swore he had seen a feather as long as his arm drift past the bowsprit. He kept it, mind. Pressed it in the ship's Bible, and I have it still. Pass that lamp back, Joan, and I'll show you.