Colour phoenix tattoo in orange, red and yellow with spread wings and purple swirls across a person's upper back.

Phoenix tattoo on upper back

Neo-trad · Back · Colour · Photo

A phoenix with outstretched wings, a curved neck and a feathered tail rises across the upper back, with a few loose feathers drifting above its beak. The linework is bold, and the feathers are shaded from yellow through orange to deep red. Soft purple swirls behind the bird suggest smoke or flame and fill the lower half of the composition.

Neo-trad Back Phoenix Bird Feather Swirl Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last of the windfalls had gone soft in the grass by the time Dad lit the bonfire at the bottom of Long Orchard, and the whole valley smelt of cider and burnt cherry wood. He had been cutting out the dead limbs for a week, dragging them down the rows on the old tractor until the heap was taller than the shed roof.

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The Coxes were finished. Mum had sold the last crates to the man from Ledbury, and the pickers had gone back to their vans with their wages in brown envelopes. What was left was the old Bramley by the gate, the one lightning had split the spring I turned nine. Dad wanted it down. Gran always said it would come back, and in June it had put three green shoots along the scar, though nobody had the heart to tell him they were only suckers.

When he touched the match to the kindling, the wood caught slowly and then all at once. Sparks climbed past the top branches and turned over in the dusk, gold at the core and red at the edges, and the smoke rolled sideways over the hedge in long purple ribbons that looked nothing like smoke at all. I stood with the rake in my hands and watched a single ember ride the updraught higher than the rest, circle the Bramley twice, and settle on the bark of its split trunk, where it glowed for a moment and then went out.

Dad saw me staring and didn't say anything. He took the saw off its hook, carried it to the gate, and hung it back on the nail. We would cut the tree in the morning, or we wouldn't. The fire would still be smouldering by then and the shoots would still be pushing through the bark, and I thought that if anything was going to rise out of that ash, it might as well be the thing that had already survived one fire.