Colourful phoenix tattoo in orange, red, yellow and blue on a forearm, with a wrist full of bangles and a patterned top visible.

Phoenix tattoo on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A phoenix rises in flight, with its wings and tail feathers drawn as flowing, flame-like shapes in orange, red and yellow. Its head and crest sit higher on the forearm, outlined in darker blue-grey tones. The colour dominates the composition against the plain skin, with a dark background behind the arm and a patterned top at the edge of the frame.

Forearm Phoenix Bird Flame Feather

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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

Now sit close, for the oven is still warming and the bread won't rise without a listening ear. Before the carts came rattling up Mill Lane, Bessie Harrow lit the fire at the back of her bakery with a handful of split pine and a sour word for the frost, and she did it every morning for forty years, the way a body breathes without asking leave.

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The winter of the big freeze, the oven went out in the night and would not take a spark. Tamsin, the girl who swept for her, went to rake the ash and found a bird sitting in it, no bigger than a thrush, its feathers the colour of a banked coal and its crest like a struck match. It looked at her with one eye, then the other, and said plainly that it was cold and hungry, and that Bessie had always been a fool about bread.

So Bessie made a bargain with it, for she was never one to leave a fire unfed. Every dawn the bird would sit on the warm brick and the oven would roar, and in return the first loaf from each batch must go to whoever knocked at the door before the shutters opened, no questions and no coin. For years it kept. The bakery never cooled, not even in the worst of the snows.

Then one morning a thin boy with a tinker's cart came knocking before the bird had finished its breakfast, and Bessie, too tired to argue, handed him the loaf still hot from the tray. When she turned round the bird had gone up through the flue in a burst of sparks, and the oven lay cold for the first time in forty years. Tamsin still swears the steam off that loaf hung in the air a moment in the shape of two wings. The next dawn the oven lit itself, and it has never gone out since. Mind the crust now, mind it, it bites.