Colour tattoo of a phoenix with flame-like red, orange and yellow feathers and trailing tail plumes, placed on the side of a person's ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flame-coloured phoenix on the side ribs

Ribs · Colour · Photo

A phoenix rises in mid-flight with its wings spread wide and its tail feathers trailing downwards in long, flowing strands. The linework is soft and painterly, with feathers shaded from deep red through orange to yellow to suggest fire. The design fills the side of the torso against plain skin, with a pink garment visible at the left edge.

Ribs Phoenix Bird Flame Feather Fire

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift in Harcourt House had been broken since March, so every evening Mr Abara carried his shopping up eleven flights and stopped on each landing to swear at the stairs. I was on the ninth when I heard paint tins clatter above me, and found Kit Doyle kneeling on the concrete with a brush in each hand and a stripe of vermilion drying on his trainers.

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He was painting a bird on the back wall, where the bins used to be before the council moved them. He had sketched it in charcoal first, one wing thrown wide across the breeze block and a long tail spilling down toward the drain grate. "It's on fire," he said, not looking up. Where the red gave way to orange, he had dragged yellow through it with a dry brush so the feathers seemed to lick upward. "My nan says they burn up and come out new. I told her that's rubbish. I wanted one anyway."

Nobody on Harcourt liked the wall. The council letters called it graffiti, and the residents' association held a meeting that ended in a row about parking. I brought Kit a flask of tea every evening for a week, and each night the bird had grown: a head turned sideways, an eye picked out in gold, the tail lengthening down the brickwork until it reached the skirting.

On the Friday the council van came. The men stood in the car park with their hands in their pockets and looked up at it for a long time. Then one of them said it was a fair bit better than the tags, and they drove off. Kit wasn't there to hear it. He had gone to live with his dad in Leeds, and the last thing he left me was a half-empty tin of vermilion with the lid pressed on hard. I keep it by the kettle. Every evening I climb the stairs, and the bird is still rising over the bins, its tail trailing down into the dark.