Pencil drawing of a phoenix with wings spread wide, rising through stylised flames beneath a faint circular sun, shown as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Phoenix rising through flames

Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a phoenix with its wings fully spread, its head turned upward and its long tail feathers trailing down through a field of flames. A faint circular sun or halo sits behind the bird. The work uses fine pencil linework and soft graded shading in black and grey, with the flames and feathers filling the full height of the page.

Phoenix Wing Flame Sun Feather

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the gutter, that's where the rain goes when it's been told to leave. Right. Last winter, when the fog sat on Vine Street like a wet dog, a woman called Ada Pellow came down the steps of the Gasworks Tavern with an empty tin under her arm, because her stove had died and the pawnbroker had her last shilling.

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She found the bird on the wall of the coal yard, where nothing with feathers had any business being. Its wings were spread wider than a hansom cab is long, grey as pencil lead, every flight feather drawn so fine you could count them under the lamp. Its tail poured down into the gutter, and the river smoke that pooled there was licking at it like a cat at spilt milk. Behind its head hung a pale ring of light, the sort of moon you see through cloud, and the bird turned its face up to it as if waiting for a cue.

"You've been carrying fire the wrong way round, Ada," it said, in a voice like a coal shifting in the grate. "Hold it low and it only sulks."

Ada was not a woman who took advice from birds, but she was colder than she had ever been, so she tipped her empty tin toward the tail and let the bird's own flames catch the rim. The fire went up her arm and into the lamp-post, into the shutters of the pawnbroker's, into every chimney on Vine Street, until the whole street glowed like a lantern held up to a face. The fog lifted off the rooftops in long grey sheets. The bird rose on heat alone, its wings beating once, then not beating at all, and climbed into the halo until it was a sun itself.

They still say the coal yard wall is warm in the mornings. Ada never once struck a match again, and she never needed to. On the first frost of every year, one grey feather turns up on her step, and the pawnbroker, to his lasting regret, has never been able to sell it.