Black tribal-style phoenix with swept wings and a long flowing tail on a plain white background, shown as a design for a tattoo.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal phoenix design in black ink

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A stylised phoenix faces right, with wings raised and spread and a long, tapering tail curling downwards. The design is built from bold, flowing black strokes with solid tribal shapes and fine tapered ends. It is shown in black on a plain white background with no skin or body part visible.

Blackwork Phoenix Bird Wing Feather 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 bellows-men of Carrow had stopped singing by the third night of the ash, so it fell to me, a glassblower's apprentice with singed eyebrows, to climb the Hollin stair and see whether the bird was still on the tower roof. Nobody else would go. Their grandmothers had warned them what the phoenix did to people who stared at it too long, and nobody wanted to be the one who stared.

Keep reading

It was there, but not as the nursery rhymes had painted it. Its wings were lifted like the black spines of a fan, each feather drawn out into a long, flame-edged blade, and its head was turned towards the east, where the sun used to rise before the smoke took it. The tail hung down the tower wall in curls, thin as wet thread, and every curl ended in a point that looked sharp enough to cut the wind.

I asked it, in the foolish way you speak to animals when you are frightened, whether it meant to stay. It did not answer. But the smoke in the valley began to thin along the lines of its wings, as though someone had raked the sky with a comb, and I understood that it had been holding the weather apart with them all along.

We rebuilt Carrow the following spring. My name is not on the wall where the founders are listed, which suits me fine. Every year I climb the Hollin stair with a pot of pitch and a soft brush, and I touch up the strokes the rain has worn away, so the bird stays as sharp as it was the morning it came back to us.