Colour tattoo of a stylised blue and pink phoenix among cherry blossoms on the forearm, in a botanical neo-traditional style.

Phoenix and cherry blossom on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A stylised phoenix with outstretched wings and a long, flowing tail sits at the centre of the design, with its plumage shaded in blue, purple, teal and pink. Pink cherry blossoms, red buds and fine dark linework with curling swirls surround the bird and trail down the arm. The colour is soft and painterly against the skin, and the composition runs vertically along the limb.

Botanical Neo-trad Forearm Phoenix Bird Cherry blossom Flower Bud Feather Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lock keeper at Thornley had called across the water twice to say it was dropping, but Ada kept her brush moving along the curl of the tail. The blue had to dry before the teal went in, and there would be no second go until the weather turned. The narrowboat Patience Rose sat low in the cut beside her, and the bird on her cabin side had been fading for six winters. Now it rose from the panel with its wings lifted, the old fire gone out of it.

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Gran had painted it every spring, kneeling on the roof with a jam jar of water and a brush worn down to a whisker. In the early years the bird was orange and gold, bought from a chandler in Gloucester who swore it would last a lifetime. It hadn't. Gran had switched to blues and purples the year the orchard at Ashby Wharf came into flower, when the boats tied up for blossom week and the children ran barefoot along the towpath gathering petals in their jumpers. Gran had pressed the pink petals into the paint herself, and she always said the bird needed something softer to fly over.

Ada had no petals left in the tin, so she had walked up to the wharf that morning and filled her coat pockets from the fallen blossom in the grass. She crushed them against the lid of the pot until the pink went the colour she remembered. The tail was the hard part. It had to run down the side in long feathered strokes and finish in a spiral that curled under the gunwale, where nobody looked unless they were leaning out to fend off.

When she finished, the lock gates groaned open and the water surged through. The Patience Rose lifted and turned slowly into the channel. A single petal came loose from the cabin roof, skated over the wake and caught in the spiral of the tail, where it spun there, pink against the teal, all the way to the next bend.