Colour tattoo of a phoenix with spread wings and swirling tail feathers in orange, red and yellow, on a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Phoenix tattoo on upper back

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A phoenix rises with its wings spread wide and its head turned to the side, with a small green eye visible. Its long tail breaks into curling, scroll-like feathers that run down the lower part of the design. The linework is smooth and the shading is soft, with warm orange, red and yellow ink blending across the wings and body against plain skin.

Back Phoenix Bird Wing Feather Swirl Tail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fire in the galley of the Marigold had gone out twice before the Cornish winter was out, and Cook Ada Penhallow swore the third time would be her last. She raked the ash on the fourth morning out past the Scillies and found a single ember lying under the grate, red as a cut lip and not dead at all. She blew on it. It did not catch. She blew again, and the ember opened its wings.

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It was no bigger than a gull's egg, and it stood on the iron bar with its neck curved like a question mark, looking at her with one green eye. The men came down for their burgoo and stopped in the doorway. Old Tam Reeve crossed himself with a ladle. Ada told them to sit and eat, because the bird wanted nothing from them and she would not waste a good pot of porridge on fright.

The bird grew with every scrap of oatmeal it was given. By Lundy it had a tail that trailed behind it along the deck like a loose sail, the feathers curling at their ends into scrolls that snagged on the ropes and had to be untangled each night. By the time they raised Land's End its wings filled the galley from wall to wall, and the copper pans sang when it beat them.

They came into Falmouth on the spring tide with the hold full of pilchards and the galley cold as a church. Ada lifted the bird down the gangway in a sack, meaning to carry it up the hill and leave it on the moor, where it belonged. At the top of the quay she opened the sack. The bird looked at the sky, then at her, and was gone in a streak of colour, leaving one warm feather in her palm. It was still warm an hour later, and still warm the next winter, when she lit the galley fire herself.