Black and grey phoenix tattoo with outstretched wings and a long curling tail across a person's upper back and shoulder blade.

Phoenix with a long curling tail on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A phoenix-like bird with spread wings and a long, S-shaped tail runs from the shoulder blade down the upper back. The design uses fine, ornamental outline work with patterned feathers, scale-like detail on the tail, and soft grey shading. The image is a close, angled photograph of bare skin against a plain grey background.

Back Phoenix Bird Wing Feather Tail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last ferry left Wrenhythe on the ebb, and Oda Penn stayed on the slipway because the bird had landed on the tallow barge again. Nobody had seen it come down. Its tail lay across the planks like a river that had decided to stop, ringed in scales the colour of old pewter, and its wings were folded so high that the gulls kept their distance.

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The old women of the Sallow Reach said a phoenix only came to a town that owed it something. They said the town had burned once, in the years when the sky was still full of satellites and nobody looked up to count them, and the bird had carried one ember out through the smoke and kept it alive in its chest. Oda did not believe the old women. She believed the barge owner, Tobias Hale, who wanted the bird gone before the inspectors came over from Lynn.

She climbed aboard with a jar of brine and a rag. The bird opened one eye, grey as the estuary, and let her wipe the crusted salt from its throat. Its feathers were worked in small lozenges and fern shapes, and when she traced one with her thumb the pattern rose under her skin like the lines on a chart. The bird lifted its head. The tail uncoiled off the deck, slow as a rope paying out, and it rose over the reeds with the ferry bell ringing behind it.

Three weeks later Tobias Hale found a single feather on his pillow, still warm, with a shape pressed into its vane like a ledger mark. He sold the barge the following spring. No boat in the reach has burned since, and Oda still keeps a glass of brine by the slipway steps, in case the bird wants its throat seen to.