Black ink line drawing of a stylised phoenix with swirling feathers and a long curling tail on a plain pale background, shown as a design rather than on skin.

Flowing phoenix line design

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A single bird, likely a phoenix, is drawn in black ink with its head turned to the left and wings raised in an upward sweep. A long tail of thin, curling lines and small teardrop dots trails down and ends in a looping flourish. The linework is fine and even, set against a plain cream background with no colour apart from the black ink.

Fine line Phoenix Bird Feather Swirl Wing Tail Flourish Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fire damp came up through the Hollin Pit on a Tuesday, and by the Thursday the women of Carrow Bank had stopped counting the men still below. Ada Lowther kept the lamp burning in her window regardless, a brass thing with a cracked glass that her husband had carried for twenty years, and she set it facing the pithead so any man crawling up the lane in the dark would know which way was home.

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Her neighbour, old Tomas Greaves, came by each evening to tell her there was nothing new. He had a tin bird he kept in his waistcoat, a scrap of bent sheet metal the boys had cut for him, and on the third night he set it on her table and said his grandmother had told him the phoenix lived in the coal seams and rose out of the ash of every bad winter. Ada laughed at him. She did not laugh when he drew it for her on the back of a wage slip, the head turned to the left, the wings lifted like a pair of hands, the long tail trailing down into a curl of smoke.

On the Saturday the rescue party brought up eleven men alive and two not, and Ada's Walter was among the living, grey as the slag heap and coughing black into a handkerchief. He asked after the lamp before he asked after her. She told him it had burned the whole time. He said he had seen a light all along the drift, a steady thread of gold, and had followed it the whole way up.

Tomas took the wage slip back that night and folded it into his waistcoat with the tin bird. Ada never found out whether he had truly believed in the bird or only in the lamp, and she decided, after some thought, that it made no difference to the men who came up the lane.