Watercolour-style phoenix with black linework and a script quote, Those we love never truly leave us, on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Phoenix and script quote on upper back

Lettering · Back · Mixed · Photo

A bird resembling a phoenix with outstretched wings and a long trailing tail sits on the upper back near the shoulder blade. Loose black linework is overlaid with soft orange, yellow and purple washes that spread beyond the outlines. Black cursive script below the bird reads Those we love never truly leave us, and the composition is diagonal, running from the shoulder down towards the spine.

Lettering Back Phoenix Bird Wing Feather Quote Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The schoolmistress at Low Ashby kept a biscuit tin of cold ash on her windowsill, and nobody in the village thought to ask her why. Every twenty years, when the old pupils came back up Chapel Lane for the reunion, the ash stirred on its own, and a bird the colour of a harvest sunset came down out of the sky to sit on the schoolhouse gate. Its wings were wide as a cart's bed, and its tail trailed behind it like a fistful of unspun silk, dragging orange and violet through the hedgerows.

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The year Mary Pell turned sixty, she came up the lane with her husband's coat over one arm and her list of names folded in her pocket. The bird was waiting. It looked at her the way the old headmaster used to look over his spectacles, sharp but not unkind, and then it turned its head towards the hall, where the trestles were laid with pies and paper cups. Mary understood that it wanted her to read the register aloud.

She read the names one by one, and at each name the bird lifted a wing and let it fall. When she reached the last line, the one she had never written, she stopped. The bird opened its beak, and no sound came, only a thread of smoke that curled up into the rafters and hung there. Mary took the tin from her coat, tipped the ash onto the cold flagstones, and watched the bird step into it, feather by feather, until there was nothing on the step but a faint warmth and one gold tail feather.

Mary pressed the feather between the pages of the register, at the line for her brother, who had gone into the North Sea the winter they were nine. The next morning the tin on the windowsill was full of ash again, though nobody in Low Ashby had filled it.