Black and grey phoenix tattoo with pink flowers and fine swirling linework on a person's upper back and shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Phoenix and pink flowers on the upper back

Back · Mixed · Photo

A phoenix with spread wings and a long, flowing tail is tattooed across the upper back. Three pink blossoms and thin swirling linework sit to the left of the bird. The bird is shaded in soft greys, with the tail feathers curling down the back.

Back Shoulder Phoenix Bird Wing Flower Blossom Swirl Feather

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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

Mind the step, there's a loose board by the ticket tent that has been waiting for a fool since before your mother was born. Sit on the stool with four legs. The other one belongs to the ghost of Hector Bale, who never could sit still and still can't. Now, you want the bird. Everybody wants the bird.

Keep reading

The Fenwick and Daughter Travelling Wonder folded in the autumn of the wet year, when the big top sagged under its own rain and the lions were sold to a farm in Lincolnshire. Its last act was a phoenix. Hector built it from bent wire and grey muslin, a hundred strips for the tail, and his daughter Edie painted three pink blossoms on the ring curtain, because her father had promised her a cherry orchard and never once delivered one.

Each night the lamp under the stage sent the bird's shadow up the canvas, long wings spreading, tail curling down over the sawdust like smoke that had decided to stay. Nobody came in the rain. Edie kept the tail. When the last bills went unpaid she cut the muslin into strips and sewed them into her coat lining, one for each town where they had died a little more.

That's the story, near enough. Hector went to the county workhouse and never came out, and the tent rotted to rags on a field near Ely. But the bird is still flying. Ask the lamp-boys, if you can find any left. Ask anyone who has ever stood under a wet tent watching shadows. Now. Pennies, if you please, and mind the board on your way out.