Colourful phoenix tattoo with outstretched wings and long trailing tail feathers on a person's upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Phoenix tattoo on upper back

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A phoenix rises with wings spread wide, its feathers shaded in blue, purple, red and orange with dark outlines. The long tail feathers trail downward in teal, green and orange strokes. The bird is centred on the upper back, with the shoulder and hair visible at the edges of the frame.

Back Phoenix Bird Wing Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ruth,

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Ward 9 was quiet last night, which is how I know something is coming. Mr Abernethy in bed six asked me at two o'clock if I had ever seen a bird burn and not die. I said the kettle had been on too long and he should try to sleep. He didn't. He pointed at the window, where the lamp from the car park lay orange across the glass, and told me his wife used to draw a phoenix on his arm in biro when they were courting in Hull, so it would be the first thing he saw when he came in off the docks.

I sat with him until the bloods came up from the lab. He talked about feathers. He said the trick was that the bird never had to choose between the fire and the flight, it just let the fire lift it. I thought of the sluice porter who'd come in that morning with a scalded palm, laughing about it, and wondered whether Mr Abernethy had been a bird himself in some other life. Nurses aren't supposed to think like that at half three.

At four the wind got up and rattled the sash. His eyes were shut but his fingers kept moving on the blanket, tracing something long and curling, the way you'd draw a tail. I put my hand over his and he said, "There she goes," quite clearly, and then he slept properly for the first time since Thursday.

When I left at seven the sky over the multi-storey had gone the colour of a yolk breaking, and a single gull was riding the updraught above the bins. I stood at the staff door a long while. I'm writing this on the back of a drug chart because I forgot my notebook. Mum's birthday is Sunday. Come up on the train and we'll walk to the pier.

Love, Jo