Colour tattoo of a fiery orange and yellow phoenix with spread wings and grey smoke swirls, placed on the side of the ribs.

Phoenix in flames on the ribs

Neo-trad · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A phoenix with spread wings and a raised head sits in the centre of the design, with long flame-like feathers trailing up and down the body. The linework is bold and the feathers and body are shaded with smooth gradients from deep red to bright yellow. Soft grey swirls of smoke fill the background behind the bird, and the photograph is taken from a side angle across the ribs.

Neo-trad Ribs Phoenix Bird Flame Feather Smoke Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The furnace at Hollins Street had been lit since before my father was born, and nobody on the night shift was allowed to let it go cold. Mr Okonedo, who ran the annealing bay and taught me to read a flame by its colour, said a dying furnace sulks for a week before it finally stops. At eleven each night I fed it coke and listened for the roar to settle into the low hum that meant the bricks were holding.

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In March the roof of the warehouse across the canal went up in the small hours. We watched from the loading dock with our coats over our heads, the sky above Burslem gone the colour of a brass kettle, sparks lifting off the timbers like a flock of frightened starlings. By dawn there was nothing left but black joists and a smell that clung to our hair. Okonedo walked the rubble with a torch and came back with a lump of cooled glass the size of a fist, streaked red and gold where the heat had caught it.

He wanted it melted down. I told him it was only rubbish from someone else's kiln, and I said it with the certainty you only have at three in the morning. He set it in the pot anyway. When we opened the mould the next afternoon, the piece had lifted and fanned into long tongues of colour, as if it had been drawn through air instead of sand.

I still keep it on the windowsill of my office. It is lighter than it looks, and when the sun comes in low the yellow at its tips turns almost white, the way the sky did over the canal before anyone knew what had been burning.