Black and grey realism tattoo of a phoenix with spread wings over the upper back and shoulder, with peacock feathers running down the spine to the lower back.

Phoenix and peacock feathers across a back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large phoenix with outstretched wings and a detailed head sits over the upper back and shoulder, with its tail feathers trailing down the spine. Below, peacock feathers with eye markings spread across the lower back, with fine hatching and soft shading on the feathers. The image is black and grey, shown in a close-up of the bare back against a plain warm wall.

Realism Back Shoulder Phoenix Bird Wing Feather Peacock feather Eye Spine

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fire in the galley had gone grey before Mrs Abernethy noticed the bird on the rail. It sat with its back to the sea, wings folded like a shut fan, and when she set down the bread knife it turned its head and looked at her with an eye as black and bright as a coal. Nobody had ever seen a bird that size on the Marigold Wren, and nobody had seen the tail either.

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The tail was no bird's tail. It ran from the bird's shoulders over the rail and along the deck in a river of long feathers, and at the tip of every feather sat an eye, green and gold, that opened and closed slowly as the ship rolled. The cabin boy wanted to sell the lot to a dealer in Lisbon. The bosun wanted to throw the thing overboard. Mrs Abernethy only shook a handful of oats from her apron and set them on the boards.

That night the wind turned, and the Marigold Wren struck the reef off Finisterre with a sound like a cart going over cobbles. Water came up through the hold. The bird rose from the rail and spread its wings until they filled the galley door, and the men swore afterwards that every lamp on the ship lit at once, though nobody had lit them. It lifted the hull off the rock on one beat of its wings and set her down in deep water, and then it was gone.

In the morning the stove was warm and the bread was rising on the table. Beside the loaf lay one peacock feather, its eye still open. Mrs Abernethy kept it in her apron pocket until she died, and when the men asked why she never sold it, she said a feather that has carried a ship home is not a thing you sell.