Large grey phoenix tattoo with long flowing tail feathers across a woman's back, with a small star and a small character tattoo nearby.

Phoenix tattoo across a woman's back

Japanese · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large phoenix with spread wings and a crested head is tattooed across the upper and middle back, with its long tail feathers sweeping down towards the lower back. The linework is fine and the feathers are built up with soft grey shading and dark accents. The tattoo is in black and grey with no colour ink, and a small star sits on the shoulder while a small character tattoo appears at the base of the spine.

Japanese Back Phoenix Bird Wing Feather Star Character

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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

Shut your mouths and mind the fire, because the snow will not wait for the slow ones. Every winter the Dorn pass takes a mule or two, and every spring the old carters say the same thing: the bird took them. I was there the winter it came down out of the cloud, so I will tell you what I saw, and you may decide whether I am a liar.

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Its crest was like a blade of frost, and its head bent sideways the way a heron's does when it listens for the river. Each wing was wider than the toll house door, feathers layered like shingles, grey as wet slate at the edges and nearly black where they folded. Its tail did not stop. It poured down the rocks behind it in long ribbons, four, five, nine of them, and where they touched the ice the ice went quiet and took on the shape of their barbs. Marta Ruhl, who kept the toll, swore she counted every one before she shut her eyes.

The bird had come for a debt. Forty years earlier a carter named Anselm Trech had crossed the pass in a whiteout and sheltered in a hollow where a fledgling lay with a broken wing. He bound it with his belt and left it his bread. A mountain does not forget bread. The only coin it accepts is a life for a life, so the bird had come to take the first traveller who would not turn back.

Marta went out with a lantern and a heel of loaf, and she said nothing, only set the bread on the snow and walked back inside. The wings folded. The tails lifted off the rock like smoke. In the morning the road was open, and Anselm's grandson, lost three days on the high path, walked down with a birch splint neatly bound to his arm. Nobody in the valley has ever asked him where he got it. Now pass the bread, and mind the soup, it is hot.