Black and grey phoenix design with red cherry blossom flowers and petals, drawn in a Japanese style with no body placement shown.

Phoenix with cherry blossoms design

Japanese · Mixed · Flash

A large phoenix with spread wings and a long, flowing tail rises upward, with a crested head and an open beak. Its feathers are rendered in fine black linework with grey shading, and the tail trails into scattered dark dots and sweeping curved lines. Five-petalled red cherry blossoms cluster around the bird and drift as loose petals against a plain white background.

Japanese Phoenix Bird Cherry blossom Flower Petal Feather Wing Tail

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 ash had gone cold in the schoolroom grate before the last of the old pupils came up the lane, and still nobody had agreed who would fetch the key from Mrs Pell. Forty-one of them had signed the card in the Crown. Six came. They stood in the yard with their coats open, reading the chalk on the blackboard through the window as if it might still be wrong.

Keep reading

Marion was the first to say it. When they were eight, the master had told them the phoenix only came to a place where something had been burned down to nothing. Every child in that room had believed him, and every one of them had thought it was a story about somebody else's house. Old Tam Greaves had kept a sheaf of cherry blossom pressed in the hymn book, because his mother used to say blossom was what the fire left behind before the bird. Nobody had ever asked him what she meant.

They found the book on the windowsill, the pages stuck together with sap and damp. Inside, petals the colour of a healed scald lay between the verses. Someone laughed, then stopped. Out past the gate, in the hedge where the school orchard used to be, a bird the colour of wet slate lifted its head and opened its beak, and the air smelled of rain on hot stone.

They did not stay to watch it fly. They walked back down the lane in silence, each carrying a petal in the palm of a hand, and none of them ever told Mrs Pell the key had been left in the lock.