Colour tattoo of a phoenix with spread wings and a long swirling tail across the upper back, shown on a person with short blonde hair.

Multicoloured phoenix on upper back

Neo-trad · Back · Colour · Photo

A phoenix with spread wings and a green head rises from the centre of the upper back, with red, orange and yellow flames along the wings and blue feathers. The long tail sweeps down to the lower left in blue and red curls, finished with soft shading and fine outlines. The bird is set against plain skin, with a dark background behind the shoulder.

Neo-trad Back Phoenix Bird Wing Feather Flame Tail Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had sealed the Ravensgate road for nine days when the stranger came down the inn stair with a tin of paints under his arm. Nobody had sent for him. Old Tamsin, who kept the kitchen fire, set a bowl of broth before him and asked what he wanted in a place where nothing grew but cold.

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"A hearth," he said, "and one night of warmth, and I will leave you a bird." He would not say more. He sat by the grate with his brushes and painted on the back of a cracked slate: a bird with its wings spread wide, flames running up every feather, a head as green as the spring meadows beyond the pass, and a long tail that curled down and away like smoke finding the door. Tamsin's grandson, Edwin, watched the colours come up wet and bright and asked why the bird had no feet.

"Because it never lands," said the stranger. "It only rises, and each time it rises it has to be set alight again." Then the fire sank. The logs had been green since Michaelmas and the bellows had split, and by midnight the kitchen was grey and the cold came up through the flags like water. Tamsin held the slate to the last ember. The paint did not run. The bird seemed to lift its wings, and the room grew warm enough that Edwin unbuttoned his coat.

By morning the stranger was gone and the slate lay face down on the step. The snow had stopped. On the flagstone where he had sat, a curl of soot in the shape of a tail ran to the door and stayed there, and no mop or scrubbing would lift it, so the inn kept that corner unswept and never once let a fire go out in the grate beside it.