Colour phoenix tattoo with flame-toned wings and curled black linework across the upper back, seen from behind on a woman with her face turned away.

Phoenix tattoo across a woman's upper back

Neo-trad · Back · Colour · Photo

A large phoenix rises across the upper back, with wings spread from the shoulder blade and a long tail of flowing feathers curling down the spine. The bird is shaded in reds, oranges and yellows, with soft blended edges, and finished with dark curled outlines and swirling feather tips. The composition is centred on the back with plain skin around the design, and the subject is shown from behind.

Neo-trad Back Phoenix Bird Feather Swirl Flame Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Shift over and make room, the wind off the river has teeth tonight, and I am too old to tell this twice. You want the bird, then you want the boy, because the bird never came to anyone who was not already a little burnt. This was Heliopolis, in the years when the sun-priests kept a fire lit on the sacred stone and nobody was allowed to let it die. Ptahmose was given the job of feeding it, a thin boy with ash to the elbows and a mother who sold lentils by the gate.

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One dry season the oil ran short, and the priests, who were fat and frightened, told him to let the flame go out for a single night so the gods might be pleased by the silence. Ptahmose did not believe that. So he carried the last glowing coal in his cupped palms all the way down to the reed beds, barefoot, singing to keep the thing alive. His hands blistered. He did not drop it.

At dawn, on the mud bank where the river bends, the coal opened. First a line of red, like a seam in a cloak, then a neck, then a crest of gold feathers unfurling in the cold air. The bird rose from his hands with a sound like a sail filling, and its tail came out behind it in long curling plumes that caught the first light and flicked sparks onto the water. Ptahmose said nothing. Neither did the fishermen, who had come down to see what all the singing was about.

And that is why, when the sun-priests went looking for their fire the next morning, they found only a boy asleep in the reeds with his hands open and healing, and a smell of cedar smoke on the wind. The bird was gone. Its ash went into the river, and the river, as you know, carries everything it is given down to the sea. Now drink your beer and go home. The fire will still be there tomorrow, mostly.