Phoenix tattoo on the upper back, with outlined wings filled in orange and yellow and a black swirling tail.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Phoenix tattoo on upper back

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A phoenix with spread wings and a tall, curling tail is tattooed centrally on the upper back. The bold black outlines define the feathers and tail, with orange and yellow shading filling the wings and a few warm tones at the body. The bird is shown from behind against warm, lightly freckled skin, with the head and hair of the wearer cropped out at the top of the frame.

Back Phoenix Bird Wing Feather Swirl Tail

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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

You come up the stairs of Calder House because the lift has been dead since March, and every landing smells of bleach and somebody's dinner. Nine floors of cold concrete breathe down your neck. Your grandad's tin of enamel paints knocks against your hip with each step, the orange tin rattling loudest, the black one already half empty from the signboard job at the chippy on Ferry Road. Nobody asked you to paint anything. That's the point.

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On the eleventh floor landing the wall is the colour of weak tea, with a gouge in the plaster where somebody kicked a door. You kneel and start with the outline, the way he taught you, one long unbroken line for each wing so the eye believes it. The black goes on thick and glossy. Then the feathers sweep out from a body no bigger than your palm and taper into a tail that curls down past the skirting board and keeps going, all the way to the cracked tiles where the bins stand. Your fingers ache. The sodium light outside buzzes and dips, and every time it dips you swear the bird has moved.

A week later the council sends two men with rollers and a tin of magnolia. You hear them before you see them, grumbling up the stairwell. You don't run. You sit on the top step with your knees up and wait. The older one stops on the landing and looks at the wall for a long time without speaking. The younger one says, 'Who did this?' and you tell him nobody, which is nearly true.

The older man sets his roller down in its tray. He takes a photo on his phone, then another, and says the Hendersons on eleven will want to see it before anyone touches it. Afterwards you stand alone in the stairwell. The window catches the last of the evening, and the orange in the wings glows as if it has been waiting all this time for someone to give it permission to burn.