Colour phoenix tattoo with flowing orange and red tail feathers, a small triangle and the words wit beyond measure, on a lower back in neo-traditional style.

Phoenix with script on the lower back

Neo-trad · Back · Colour · Photo

A phoenix with spread wings and a flowing tail sits on the lower back, with the words "wit beyond measure" in black script beneath its tail. Its feathers are shaded in red, orange and yellow, with a small outlined triangle near its body. The photo is taken close up against bare skin, with a yellow leopard-print garment at the bottom edge.

Neo-trad Back Phoenix Bird Feather Script Quote Triangle

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

Mrs Pell had let rooms at Gull Rest for thirty-one years, and in all that time no lodger had set fire to the hearth rug, until Mr Corran arrived in March with a tin trunk and a box of lucifers he said were for his pipe.

Keep reading

Her daughter Winnie, sixteen and in the habit of reading anything left on the stairs, noticed he burned something each night once the house had gone to bed. On the third night she crept down and found him kneeling at the grate, feeding in a page at a time. The paper caught and flared orange, and the flame climbed the flue as though it had somewhere to be. Out of the smoke he lifted a half-charred sheet with a small triangle drawn in one corner and, beneath it, in careful copperplate, the words wit beyond measure.

'It was my wife's,' he said, without turning round. 'She kept it tucked in the lid of her sewing box. Every page I burn is a sum I got wrong, and I can't seem to stop being the sort of man who keeps them.' Winnie asked whether burning them made the mistakes go away. He gave a short dry laugh and said the sea would have to decide that.

They walked the sea wall at dawn with the tide sliding in beneath them. He tipped the last of the ash over the rail and watched it spread into the grey. When they got back, Winnie took a cake of soap from the basin and wrote the words across the bathroom window in her best hand, so the steam would not hide them from the next lodger shaving there.