Black linework tattoo of a phoenix with lilies, hibiscus and small blossoms running down a thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Phoenix and lilies on a thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A large black line tattoo of a bird with spread wings rises from the top of the thigh, surrounded by lily and hibiscus-style flowers, small clustered blossoms, leaves and curling vines. Feathers trail down the lower leg. The work is outlined with no visible shading and no colour, and the design wraps diagonally across the leg against a plain background.

Botanical Thigh Phoenix Bird Lily Hibiscus Blossom Flower Leaf Vine Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp swung on its hook above the chart table, throwing the shadow of the mainmast across the cabin wall, and Nell Ferris held the tracing paper flat with the heel of her hand while the ship climbed another swell. Four weeks out from Liverpool, with the sea gone the colour of pewter, the purser had lent her one good needle, a bottle of Indian ink and a promise that she could keep the lamp lit until the second bell.

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Abel Crane had come to her with a drawing on the back of a coal invoice. A bird with its wings thrown wide, rising out of a fire that was really just a few curls of line. Lilies, he said, the same ones his mother grew against the back wall in Bristol, and small clustered blossoms like the ones that fell on the cobbles every April. He wanted vines to pull it all together and feathers to trail away down the leg, as if the bird had shed them on the way up.

She worked in the evenings, when the stokers were off watch and the engine's thrum dropped to something she could feel in her teeth rather than hear. He grumbled through the first hour and then went quiet, the way men do when the needle finds a nerve. The lines stayed thin because she kept her hand light, and by the ninth night the wings were finished and the lilies had their petals, but they ran out of paper before the feathers did.

Halifax came up grey on the eleventh morning. Abel stood at the rail with his sleeve rolled high and looked at the work for a long time. Then he laughed and said the bird looked as though it hadn't yet decided whether to burn, and that suited him fine. Nell watched him walk down the gangway with the lilies still uncoloured on his skin, and she thought the lamp would go out soon enough, but the line would hold.