Black and grey phoenix tattoo with spread wings and a long flowing tail across a bare back, in a Japanese-influenced style.

Phoenix tattoo across a woman's back

Japanese · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large phoenix with spread wings and a curling head sits across the upper back, with its long tail flowing down towards the hip. The feathers are shaded in grey with fine detail, while the swirling scroll-like elements around the bird are bold black linework. The image is black and grey on a dark background, with the subject's head cropped out of frame.

Japanese Realism Back Phoenix Bird Wing Feather Scroll Tail Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had shut the pass for nine days when Maud Tennant found the bird in the ash pit beneath the kitchen hearth. It was no bigger than a crow, grey as wet slate, and its feathers were so fine they seemed drawn in pencil on the air. She wrapped it in her apron and carried it to the bread oven, because her father always said that anything cold in February wanted feeding before it wanted kindness.

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The guests upstairs were a wool merchant, his clerk, and a widow who played patience as if she were winning an argument with someone under the floor. Each evening the bird grew a little. Its tail unspooled from the apron like black ribbon, curling into scrolls that caught the lamplight and kept it. The clerk swore the scrolls were writing. The widow said they were the names of everyone who had ever been turned away from an inn in bad weather.

On the ninth night the wind dropped, and the widow came down with a candle to find Maud crouched by the oven. The bird was lifting one wing, then the other, its feathers catching a colour like coals that did not burn anything. "It only rises," the widow said, "once someone has stopped apologising for being cold." Maud thought about that for a long while, then lifted the bar on the back door.

The bird went up through the snow without a sound, dragging its scrolls behind it like a bride's train, and the drifts took the marks as it passed. By March the road was clear. In every bank on the far side of the pass there was a curl of black ash shaped like a feather, and the carters still touch them for luck when they cross.