Black and grey fine line phoenix with a long feathered tail tattooed across the back, with a small script word near the shoulder.

Phoenix with feathered tail across a back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large phoenix in profile sits across the upper back, its wings spread and its head turned to the left, with a long tail of curling feathers running down the spine and sweeping across the lower back. The linework is fine and even, with feather detail rendered through hatched strokes and light shading on the wings and tail. The design is entirely black and grey on pale skin, set against a blurred graffiti-style wall in the background.

Fine line Back Phoenix Bird Feather Wing Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the third stair, Mrs Dunning. It gives under anyone who has eaten a second pudding, and you've eaten two. There, sit by the window where you can see the harbour lamps coming on. The sea does its best talking at this hour, and I'd not have you miss it.

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The summer my father took the lease on Gull Row, the house smelled of wet coal and boiled cabbage, and a painting hung over the kitchen range that nobody would take down. It showed a bird rising out of a grate, all wings and ash, its tail unspooling down the wall in long curled feathers like smoke that had made up its mind. Someone had lettered a single word beneath the frame in brass: BLESSED. The lodgers called it the Gull, though it was no gull, and every one of them swore the bird's head had turned a little further towards the stairs since they'd arrived.

Mr Abel Tench, a clockmaker from Leeds with a cough like a broken bellows, took the room under the eaves in October. He counted the feathers every night with a pencil, because counting was the only cure he trusted. Forty-one on the wall, forty-one in the morning. On his last night he came down to the kitchen in his nightshirt, white as the lace curtains, and said the tail had grown one more, and he had the figures to prove it. My father laughed. Then he looked, and so did I.

There was a grey feather lying on the third stair, fresh as a gull's breast, and the window was open to the tide. Mr Tench was gone by the noon train, leaving his pencil and forty-two shillings under the clock. The painting still hangs in the kitchen. I count it myself now, every dusk, and I always get one more than I did the night before.