Black stylised phoenix in flowing swirls and feather-like lines on a plain grey background, drawn as a flash design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stylised black phoenix design

Black and grey · Flash

A single bird, likely a phoenix, is shown in flowing black linework with a curled crest, swept wings and a long tail of spiralling feathers. The design is solid black on a flat mid-grey background with no shading or gradients. The composition is centred and vertical, with the wings lifting to the upper left and the tail trailing down through the lower half.

Phoenix Bird Swirl 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 ferry from Tarbert had not carried a cargo of ink in forty years, so when the crates came aboard at dawn, the deckhands crossed themselves and counted them twice. Inside each was a bottle of black, thick as tar and smelling of pine resin. Mairi Sinclair, who kept the lamp at the Skerry light, had ordered them herself, writing to a man in Glasgow who never once asked her why.

Keep reading

She painted the bird on the lighthouse wall in the second week of the gale. It took her three nights. She drew its crest first, a curl like a wave breaking back on itself, then the wings, long and swept upward as if the wind had been combed through them. The tail she left for last, letting it trail down past the window to the rocks, every feather a loop that closed on itself and opened again.

On the fourth night the sea went flat and silver, and the fishing boats saw a shape rise from the water beneath the light. It was black against the grey dawn, and it did not fall. It turned once above the skerry, the way a swallow turns before it lands, then folded its wings and went back down into the dark, where something in the water took its tail and held on.

Mairi climbed the stair that morning and found the wall bare. Only a single black feather lay on the sill, cool and heavy as a key. She kept it in the lamp room drawer, and the boats came home that week without a single man lost.