Colour traditional tattoo of a phoenix with spread wings in orange, red and yellow on a person's upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Phoenix on upper back

Traditional · Back · Colour · Photo

A phoenix with outstretched wings and a curved, flame-like tail is tattooed across the upper back, with its head turned to the left. The bold black outlines and shaded feather edges give the bird a strong, graphic form. Warm orange, yellow and red inks dominate the image, set against plain skin.

Traditional Back Shoulder Phoenix Bird Wing Feather Flame Tail

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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 lamp only lights one of you and the guard is watching the road, not us. You want the bird story. Everyone at this crossing wants the bird story, though most of them have only heard it from someone who heard it from a lorry driver.

Keep reading

Lina was nineteen the winter the bridge at Vrana froze solid. She carried letters for a bookbinder in the town across the water, sewn into the hem of her coat, because the men who searched the trucks never checked a girl's hem. That night the searchlight found her halfway over, and the sergeant, Dusan, who had grown up two doors from her mother, lifted his rifle and shouted her name as if it were a question.

She did not run. She opened her arms, and the coat fell away from her shoulders, and out of the hem and the snow came a bird the colour of a struck match. Its wings went out wider than the bridge rail. Its tail came down behind it in long curling flames, and every feather that dropped onto the ice burned without melting it. The sergeant lowered his rifle. The bird turned its head to the left, towards the old watchtower, and the tower's lamp went out, and nobody in the post could say afterwards who had switched it off.

Lina walked over the bridge with the letters. The bird went with her as far as the far bank and then it was only snow. In spring the fishermen still pull up black ash from the riverbed, and the clerk at this post uses a little of it in his ink. Show him your papers. He will stamp them with a mark that rises, and you will cross.