Reddish-brown stylised phoenix tattoo with a swirling tail on a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stylised phoenix with swirling tail on back

Back · Colour · Photo

The design shows a stylised bird, likely a phoenix, with a sweeping head, feathered wing lines and a long tail that curls into spirals at the base. The lines are smooth, tapered and bold rather than shaded, and the ink is a single warm reddish-brown. The bird sits centrally on bare skin, with soft lighting and the edge of the body visible at the right.

Back Phoenix Bird Wing Swirl 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 ice on the trough at Hollin Farm is thick enough to stand on, so you take the hammer to it before the ewes come down from the top field. Frost has got into the gate hinges again, and the collie won't leave the yard without whining. Your uncle Dai is already in the byre with the lamp lit, calling your name the way he does when he wants the job done and the talking finished.

Keep reading

The barn burned in the November before last. It took the hay, the old Fergie and most of the roof timbers, and the whole valley said the place was finished. Dai sat on an upturned bucket in the ash for a week. Then one morning in March you found a hen standing in the snow by the midden, grey with soot and very much alive, as if she had walked out of the fire on purpose. You carried her inside under your coat and she laid an egg on the kitchen table the next day, which Dai has never let you forget.

This morning he is quiet, watching the chimney smoke lean east and bend back on itself at the top like a long tail. He takes down the almanac from the dresser, the one with the cracked spine that his mother kept, and opens it to a page with a bird drawn in rust-brown ink, its neck arched, its tail coiled into two tight spirals. Under it, in her careful hand, is a date for every spring since 1931, and beside each one, the same two words: came back.

You crack the last of the ice with one blow. Water wells up black and steaming in the cold, and the ewes crowd in past you, breath rising from their mouths in soft curling plumes. Dai closes the almanac without a word and tucks it under his arm, and you both go out into the white field to count the flock.