Red, orange and black phoenix tattoo with black lace-patterned body wrapping across the elbow and onto the upper arm and forearm.

Lace phoenix wrapping around an elbow

Blackwork · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A stylised bird, possibly a phoenix, is drawn in solid black lace and floral patterns across the body and wings, with feathers in red, orange and black spreading up the upper arm. The linework is bold and the lace areas are filled in solid black, while the feathers use shaded red and orange tones. The design wraps over the elbow, against a plain dark background.

Blackwork Upper arm Forearm Phoenix Bird Feather Lace Floral pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lace had to be finished by Friday, and Ada Pryce still had four bobbins of black thread to cut when the band struck up in the Crescent Ballroom without her. Her mother had told her not to go dancing with fluff stuck to her fingers. She went anyway, in the green dress, with a scrap of Nottingham net pinned at the collar like a brooch.

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Walter Bright from the dye works found her by the lemonade urn. He smelled of coal tar soap and talked about the old designer's drawings he had found in the loft above the finishing room, a bird built from lace, all open flowers and fanned wings, that nobody had ever woven because the Jacquard cards kept jamming. Ada knew the drawing. She had traced it at fourteen with a pencil stub and a sheet of greaseproof paper, and she had kept the tracing folded inside her missal.

The lights failed during the last waltz. Someone shouted about the boiler, and then there was a smell of hot tar through the back doors and a red glow over the rooftops toward the dye works. Ada stood in the street with the dancers and watched flames climb the sky in long orange plumes that curled and split at their tips like feathers. For a moment the smoke against the stars had the shape of a bird with its wings lifted, and she thought of the drawing, and of how little of it she had ever managed to make real.

By Saturday morning the dye works was a black shell and the finishing room was gone. Ada took the tracing from her missal, pinned it to her kitchen table, and began to stitch the bird onto a band of net, one open flower at a time, until its wings reached the edge of the cloth. She carried it down to the ruins in her mother's basket and laid it across the warm bricks, where Walter found it an hour later, still holding the thread.