Full-colour phoenix tattoo in neo-traditional style with bold outlines, spreading its wings across a person's upper back.

Rainbow phoenix tattoo across the upper back

Neo-trad · Back · Colour · Photo

A phoenix with spread wings and a long, sweeping tail is tattooed across the upper back. The bird is outlined in dark, bold lines and shaded with smooth gradients in turquoise, violet, pink, orange and yellow. The composition follows the curve of the back, with the wings rising to the upper left and the tail feathers trailing down to the lower right.

Neo-trad Back Phoenix Bird Wing Feather Tail 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

You have been grinding malachite for three days when the old dyer finally tells you the bird must be finished before the river festival. He sets a length of silk across two trestles, pins it flat, and draws the phoenix in charcoal: wings flung up toward the roof beams, a tail that falls the full height of the wall. He mixes turquoise from crushed stone, violet from murex shells, pink from madder root, and saffron for the orange and yellow. Do not blend them too smoothly, he says. The bird must look as though it has not yet decided what it is made of.

Keep reading

On the last night the old man goes home with a fever, and you are left to paint the tail alone. Your hand is unsteady from the long days. A streak of saffron slips into the violet, runs, and you are certain you have ruined the whole length of silk. You sit with the brush dripping in your fist until the lamp gutters. Then you dip it again in the same orange and let it trail downward, bending it into a curl, the way the colours had been bleeding the whole time you were afraid of them.

At dawn the banner is carried to the barge and lowered over the water. The current takes the lower feathers first, and the pink and turquoise soften into the grey, the orange drawing out in thin threads behind the boat. You stand at the rail with your hands still stained blue to the wrist and watch the tail unspool across the river, until the phoenix is more a rainbow than a bird, and the mistake you made in the night has become the part that carries it away.