Colour tattoo of a rising phoenix with outstretched wings and swirling orange and red tail feathers, placed on a person's upper back near the shoulder blade.

Orange phoenix tattoo on upper back

Neo-trad · Back · Colour · Photo

A phoenix with spread wings and its head turned to the side rises from the top of the image, with its long tail feathers curling downward in scrolling flame-like forms. The linework is bold and the feathers are shaded from yellow through orange to red, giving the wings and tail depth. The design sits centrally on bare skin and fills most of the frame against a soft, blurred background.

Neo-trad Back Phoenix Bird Wing Feather Flame Swirl Tail feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp at Scarrow Head had been dark for three nights when Mab Trelawney climbed the spiral stair with a sack of coal on her back and found the keeper's boots still wet on the top step. Nobody on the mainland had sent her. The keeper, Ansel Rudd, was a thin man who counted gulls and did not speak to fishwives, and his boots were there but he was not.

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Under the lamp housing, where the oil had dried to a black crust, something was moving. It was the colour of a banked fire, and it lifted its head from its own ashes and looked at her with a gold eye. Its tail fell down through the gallery in long curling flames, each feather ending in a little scroll, like the waves coming in below the rock.

"You'll be wanting the light lit," it said, in Ansel's voice.

Mab did not argue. She filled the reservoir with the coal, struck the wick, and the bird spread its wings across the glass and the room went orange from floor to ceiling. Ships out past the reef saw the beam come back on and steered for home. The bird burned all night and did not sing, and by morning the ashes were cold and Ansel was sitting at the table with a cup of tea, his hands shaking, saying he had only fallen asleep.

Each year after that, on the third night of the storms, the lamp went out, and Mab climbed the stair with her sack. She never told the mainland what she found there, only that the phoenix kept the light and the keeper kept the boots dry, and that the sea, being sensible, had never once tried to drown a fire.