Black and grey photograph of a phoenix tattoo with swirling scrollwork across a woman's lower back and side, shown from behind with long dark hair.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Phoenix tattoo across a back and ribs

Japanese · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph shows a large phoenix with outstretched wings and a long flowing tail, set among swirling scrollwork and small floral details. The linework and shading are detailed and graduated, giving the feathers depth, and the design extends from the lower back over the side of the ribs toward the hip. The image is monochrome, and the subject is shown from behind with the face out of frame.

Japanese Back Ribs Phoenix Bird Scrollwork Swirl Feather Flower Hair

Find an artist for this

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

The car coughs twice past the sign for Cinder Flats and then gives up entirely, rolling onto the gravel shoulder with the heat still ticking off the bonnet. You sit a while with both hands on the wheel. Nothing moves out here except the wind lifting grit across the tarmac in long pale ribbons, and far off a line of wire fence that someone has strung with plastic bags, flapping like wet laundry.

Keep reading

A mile on there is a petrol station with one pump and a woman named Ottilie Vance who has been waiting for someone to come limping in for thirty years. She sells you a tin of oil and a sandwich wrapped in cling film, and tells you the old road used to burn every August when the grass dried out. The fire would come down the ridge in a rush of orange, and every summer a bird would rise out of the smoke, its long tail trailing, and circle the wreckage before settling on the roof of the derelict chapel. Nobody ever caught it. Nobody ever tried.

You fix the car by the light of a torch clamped in your teeth, the air smelling of hot metal and sage. Somewhere in the scrub a bird calls, a sound like a gate swinging on rusted hinges, and you look up to find the sky striped with the last of the sun. Your hands are black to the wrist. The bonnet clicks shut.

When you turn the key, the needle climbs and holds. In the mirror the chapel roof is empty, but the dust behind you still hangs in the shape of wings, slowly turning gold before it drifts apart into the dark.