Black fine line phoenix tattoo with flowing feathers running from the side of the ribs down onto the thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Phoenix tattoo across ribs and thigh

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A large phoenix in flight spreads its wings across the side of the ribs, with its long tail feathers sweeping down over the hip and onto the thigh. The design is drawn in black linework with fine detail on the wing feathers, and the tail ends in paisley-style feather motifs. The ink is black on skin with no colour, and the wearer is shown from the side with her hands at her waist, in underwear, against a plain tiled wall.

Fine line Ribs Thigh Phoenix Bird Feather Paisley Wing

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 gulls had been screaming at the wrong end of the wind all week, and by Thursday the smoke off Corran Head was thick enough that the ferry stopped running. You stood on the slipway with your grandmother's tin of matches in your coat pocket, the one she made you swear never to open, and watched a bird lift out of the gorse fire like a sail coming loose from its mast.

Keep reading

Nobody on Inish Corran had seen one since the chapel roof came down. Old Mairi said it came once in a long lifetime to take back something the island had burned, and that its tail, trailing the shoreline, left feathers that curled into the paisley shawls the traders once sold from the pier, the ones with teardrops turning in on themselves. She said the bird never landed. It only circled, waiting for someone foolish enough to row out to meet it.

So you took Dougal's dinghy out past the skerries, oars slapping, and the bird came down low enough that its wings shaded the whole bay. Its head turned toward your pocket, then away, as if it had already seen what it came for. You understood then that it had never wanted anything from you. Your grandmother had kept one fire going in the back kitchen for forty years so nothing else on the island would catch, and the tin was only the last of it. You opened the lid and let the matches drift onto the grey water, one by one.

The bird rose, tail feathers trailing silver over the waves, and climbed until it was only a mark against the smoke. When you reached the slipway again, a single feather lay on the wet stones, curled into a teardrop, and the wind had gone round to the west, bringing the rain.