Black and grey phoenix tattoo with spread wings and long trailing tail feathers across the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Phoenix tattoo across the ribs

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A large phoenix with wings spread wide and a long, curved head crest is tattooed along the side of the torso. The bird is rendered in black and grey with fine feather detail, soft shading and darker accents on the wing and body. Its long tail feathers sweep down toward the hip, with eye-shaped markings at the tips, and the design follows the curve of the ribs.

Ribs Phoenix Bird Wing Feather Tail feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The orchard at Coldharbour had gone grey that August, the way the Pitmans' damson trees did when the wasps got in, and nobody could say why the bird had picked it. Wenna Pitman found it first, perched on the bottom rung of the ladder in the lower field with its wings folded like a shut umbrella. Its crest curled forward over the beak, and when she came near it lifted its head and looked at her as though she were late.

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It stayed three days. It ate the windfalls and left the fruit on the branches alone. Each evening it rose, wings spread wider than the hedge, and the long tail feathers trailed through the stubble, each with a dark eye at its tip that turned to follow whoever was walking past. Her brother Tomas said it was a cockerel from the Hollis farm gone wild. Wenna knew better, because cockerels do not leave a dusting of ash where they have stood.

On the third morning Tomas tried to sack it. The bird let him come close enough to see his breath on its feathers. Then it stepped onto the ladder, opened its wings, and the whole orchard smelled of scorched sugar, and the wasps dropped from the boughs like stones. Tomas sat down in the grass and did not get up for an hour.

The next spring the damsons blossomed early and white, and the lower boughs bore fruit for the first time in forty years. Wenna went looking for the bird at the gate and found only one feather in the stubble, grey as wood smoke, with an eye at its tip that was still blinking shut when she held it to the light. She pressed it into the bark of the oldest tree, and it stayed there through the winter.