Colour tattoo of a phoenix with flame-like orange and yellow wings spread across the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Phoenix rising across the ribs

Ribs · Colour · Photo

A large phoenix in flight is shown with its wings spread wide and long trailing feathers reaching down towards the hip. The wings shade from yellow to orange to deep red, with soft blended edges and darker plumage at the bird's head and body. The tattoo fills the side of the torso, and the background is a warm, out-of-focus wall.

Ribs Phoenix Bird Wing Flame Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fire took the whole of the old yew hedge on the Thursday, and by the Monday Mrs Okonedo from next door was asking whether I meant to dig out the stumps or leave them for the crows. I told her I would wait. My grandfather used to say that a burned thing will tell you what it wants to be, if you have the patience to stand still and look at it.

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I looked every morning with a cup of tea going cold on the wall. By the second week there was a ring of green pushing up through the black roots, not bracken and not bindweed, but stems with a blush of red at each joint and leaves the colour of marmalade held up to a lamp. I measured them with my grandfather's brass rule and wrote the figures in the back of the seed ledger, under the date the hedge had gone up in smoke.

The county man came on the Friday, squinted at my notes and said I had probably planted something from a garden centre that had gone feral. I thanked him and didn't argue. He did not see what I saw, which was the shoots leaning all one way, towards the sun, as though the ground itself had decided on a direction.

By the autumn the new growth had thickened into long arching canes that swept down the bank and over the path, bright at the tips and darker towards the root. On the last evening I left the rule lying in the bed, went inside, and watched through the kitchen window as the wind lifted the tips and set them trailing like feathers over the back step.