Black and grey phoenix tattoo with spread wings and a long, flowing tail running down a forearm.

Phoenix with spread wings on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A phoenix with wings spread wide and its head turned to the right is tattooed along the forearm, with its long tail feathers trailing down towards the wrist. The wings and body are shaded in soft greys with fine feather detail, while the tail is drawn with mostly open outlines and light scrollwork. The bird fills the frame against plain skin and a granite-effect surface.

Forearm Phoenix Bird Wing Feather Tail Scrollwork

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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

Sit down, sit, the kettle's still warm from the last carter. You want the tale of the bird that came over the pass in the year the river froze? Then hush and listen, because I'll not tell it twice.

Keep reading

The customs men at Halvane had a hut with one stove and a ledger nobody read. That winter they turned back every cart heading east and every mule heading west whose papers smelled of smoke. Then one grey morning a clerk named Tobiah Brenn looked up from his desk and saw a bird perched on the gatepost, its wings spread wide as a barn door and its head turned to the right, as though someone on the far side had called its name.

Nobody had seen a bird like that. Its tail fell from its body in long threads, and where the feathers thinned they curled into little scrolls, like frost on a window. It did not sing. It only watched the stamp, the queue of frozen farmers, the slow shuffle of papers. Brenn stamped a bundle for an old widow with a goat, and the bird lifted, very slowly, and the whole shed went quiet.

By dusk the ledger had caught in a little flame on the stove, though nobody had lit it. The widow's goat walked through the gate, the carters walked after it, and when the guards came out with lanterns there was only ash on the gatepost and a single grey feather lying in the snow, curled at the tip like a question mark.

Brenn kept that feather in a biscuit tin for forty years. He never again stamped a paper without first asking whether the bearer had somewhere to go. That is the whole of it, and the tea's brewed, so mind the cup.