Full-colour realistic phoenix tattoo with red and orange flames wrapping around a person's side and ribs, with a stormy sky behind the bird.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Phoenix rising through flames across the ribs

Realism · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A large phoenix with spread red and gold wings rises from a sea of orange flames that wraps around the side of the torso, with its talons gripping a dark rock. The shading is smooth and painterly, with soft gradients in the feathers and fire and a stormy grey sky behind the bird. The design fills the whole flank and curves across the back, with the body partly draped in a pale blue cloth.

Realism Ribs Back Phoenix Fire Flame Bird Wing Sky Rock Cloud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The night the slag heap caught fire, my father stood on the black rock above Pell's Hollow with a bucket he had forgotten to fill, and he would not come down. By nine the whole of Carrick Bridge had seen the glow. By eleven the sky over the valley had gone the colour of a rusted kettle, and the clouds sat low and bruised above it, lit from underneath.

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I was fourteen and had no business up there, but I went after him in my mother's wellingtons, which filled with hot grit at every step. The fire ran along the old coal seams in a sheet of orange that licked the bracken and turned the gorse to grey ash. Somewhere beneath it, Alf Tully's younger brother had been shifting pit props when the ground gave way. The men had been digging since supper and had found nothing but heat.

My father set the bucket down on the rock and said the chapel women used to tell a story about a bird that burned and rose again out of its own ashes. I told him that was for children. He didn't argue. He only pointed. Through a tear in the smoke, something was lifting off the flames, red and gold, its wings spread wide enough to block the sky, its talons closing on the stone as though it meant to take the rock with it.

Then the wind turned, the smoke closed over it, and it was gone. Only the fire remained, and the clatter of boots on the path below as the men came up with the hose. My father picked up the bucket at last and filled it. "Well," he said, "it's never the bird that comes back down the hill." We walked down together, and I never told the chapel women what I had seen.