Colourful illustrated design of a red and teal phoenix with flowing feather linework arranged to form a skull on a dark background.

Phoenix forming a skull design

Colour · Flash

A stylised bird, resembling a phoenix, is drawn with its wings and tail feathers curling to form the outline and features of a skull. The linework is fine and flowing, with feathers built from many layered curves and swirls. The palette is red, teal and yellow on a near-black background, and the design fills the frame vertically.

Phoenix Skull Bird Feather Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost had held the farm for nine days when Ada Coyle found the bird in the ash pit behind the byre. It was smoking faintly, its feathers the colour of a bad sunset, and when she lifted the shovel it turned its head and looked at her with one eye, bright as a coal.

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Her father said to leave it be. Anything that could sit in the ashes and not burn, he said, was no good to a man with forty ewes and a roof that leaked. Ada fed it anyway, oats softened in warm milk from the pail, and by the third morning the feathers had changed. Teal ran along the edges of the wings now, and yellow where the frost had touched them, and the tail had curled itself into a spiral like the wind over the top field.

On the longest night the snow came sideways and the ewes started lambing in the lee of the barn. Her father went out with the lantern and did not come back. Ada stood at the door with her boots unlaced and watched the bird rise from the straw. It climbed through the lamplight and the wild white air, and wherever its wings turned the snow went to water and ran in gold lines across the yard. She saw the lantern swing, then steady, and her father walking home along the path the bird had opened for him.

In March the ash pit held nothing but a single yellow feather, which Ada keeps folded in the family Bible. Each winter, when the frost grows its patterns on the kitchen window, she sees a red bird there with its tail curled tight, and she leaves the bowl of milk on the sill for it anyway.