Full back tattoo of a colourful phoenix with roses, cherry blossom and wave motifs in Japanese style, shown on the back of a person with dark hair.

Phoenix and roses across a full back

Japanese · Back · Colour · Photo

A large back piece shows a phoenix with spread wings and a flame-like tail, surrounded by red roses, green leaves, pink cherry blossom and turquoise waves. The bold outlines and smooth shading give the design a Japanese look, with the feathers rendered in gradients of teal, yellow, orange and red. Bright colour fills almost the whole composition, which runs from the shoulders down to the waist against a black background.

Japanese Traditional Back Phoenix Bird Rose Cherry blossom Flower Wave Feather Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The carrier who hauled salt across the Kharan flats swore he had seen the bird twice in his life, once as a spark in the dark and once as a man's shadow rising out of a cooking fire. Nobody on the road believed him until the year the wells failed and his cart came rolling back empty, its boards scorched in long red streaks like feathers.

Keep reading

Old Tamsin Ferrow kept a rose garden at the last waystation, the only green thing for a day's walk in any direction. She had carried the cuttings across the sand in a tin box on her knees, and she watered them from a cistern she filled by hand at first light. When the carrier stopped his cart at her gate, she was already tying up the bushes, and she did not ask what he had seen. She asked only whether the fire had been warm.

That evening the bird came down over the flats with its wings spread wide and its tail streaming behind it like a flame that had decided to travel. It circled the garden three times, shedding feathers that were hot to the touch and gold at the tips, and where they landed the dry bushes split open and bloomed. Then it turned north, towards the sea that had gone out of the land long before anyone's grandmother was born, and the sky filled with a sound like water running over stones.

Tamsin kept the cistern full for the rest of her life. When the carrier asked her what the bird had wanted, she only shrugged and said it had wanted to check the roses were still there. Every spring after, one pink petal floated up in the cistern, and she fished it out with two fingers and laid it on the road for whoever came next.