Colour tattoo of a red and orange phoenix with teal accents and pink cherry blossom branches across a bare back, Neo-trad style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Phoenix and cherry blossom across a back

Neo-trad · Back · Colour · Photo

A large phoenix with spread wings and a long flowing tail covers the back and side of the torso, with its head turned to the left. Cherry blossom branches with pink flowers and loose petals frame the bird on both sides. The bird is outlined in dark linework and filled with warm red, orange and yellow shading, with teal accents on the crest, tail feathers and chest.

Neo-trad Japanese Back Phoenix Bird Cherry blossom Feather Branches Petal Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The third firing had split the bowl straight down its belly, and Ines was already reaching for the tongs when her uncle caught her wrist. "Leave it in the heat until it stops ticking," he said. "Anything that cracks in the kiln has to be let go of slowly."

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So they waited through the long night on upturned crates, the brickwork cooling by degrees, and she thought about the bird she had painted across the bowl's shoulder. Its wings spread like a fan, its tail trailing down the curve in feathers of red and gold, its crest picked out in a copper teal. Her uncle had laughed at the blossom she'd added, a loose spray of pink petals drifting over the bird's back. "Who puts cherry blossom on a phoenix?" he had asked. "Someone who has watched it fall in April," she had said, and he had let it stay.

At dawn the crack had closed. It was not healed so much as drawn tight, the glaze run into it like a seam of molten light. He turned the bowl in his palms for a long time without speaking. Then he handed it back and said the post at Lessine would want a permit for anything older than a day, and that she should say it was new.

The officer at the crossing lifted the straw and studied the bird through the bright morning. "Is it old?" he asked. Ines looked at the teal on the tail feathers, still faintly warm to the touch. "It has been burnt once," she said. He stamped the form and let the bowl through.