Black and grey realism phoenix tattoo with spread wings and a flaming tail on the side of the ribs.

Phoenix tattoo on the ribs

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A phoenix with outstretched wings rises upwards, with its tail breaking into flame-like feathers that trail down the side of the torso. The tattoo uses dark, detailed shading with fine feather texture and soft grey gradients. It is shown in black and grey against pale skin, with a black bra strap and the top of jeans visible.

Realism Ribs Phoenix Bird Wing Feather Flame

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down under the Bramley, the one with the split trunk, and mind the wasps, they have had the windfalls since Tuesday. Now. You want the bird that burned the orchard at Withy Hollow. My mother's mother had it from her own, and she swore it was true, which is what the old ones always swore. Hush, and let me tell it properly.

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It was the dry August, the year the well in the top field gave out. The apples dropped before they were ripe and lay in the grass like spent coins. Walter Pell, who kept the bees and a grudge against the Coxes, carried a brash pile into the middle of the orchard and set it alight to spite the weather. The fire took the low branches, then the leaves, and the whole row went up with a sound like a thousand pages turning. Out of the heart of it rose a bird, grey as cold ash at first, its wings held out wide like a man being measured for a coat. Then its tail broke open into flame, and the flame came down the hedge after it, feather by feather.

The village ran with buckets and got nowhere. Everyone said the bird meant to take the orchard and the cider house too. But it did not come down. It climbed, and where its burning feathers touched the grass they turned to cinders that lifted and went up after it, until the sky over Withy looked like a field of stars put on in the wrong order. Only Ada Pell, Walter's daughter, stood still with her bucket empty. She watched the bird's eye, which was the colour of the last light, and she saw that it was not burning anything. It was burning off what was already dead.

By the next spring the scorched trunks had put out blossom the colour of embers, and the bees came back to them first. You can still see the tree by the gate, black to the heart and bearing the sweetest fruit in the county. Walter never planted a thing again. He said he had seen what fire was for.