Colour tattoo of a phoenix with spread wings and flowing tail, with red hibiscus-style blooms, across the inside of a forearm.

Phoenix with flowers on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A phoenix with outstretched wings, a curved neck and a long flowing tail fills the forearm, with several red flowers tucked along its body. The linework is smooth and the wings and tail use feathered shading in orange, red, turquoise and pink. The arm is held up against a plain warm brown background, with the wrist and hand at the top of the frame and the tail curling toward the bottom.

Traditional Forearm Phoenix Bird Flower Feather Wing Tail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift at Ashgrove House had been dead since the fire, so when Nan Kiely decided the stairwell wall needed a bird, I was the one carrying the paint tins up fourteen floors. She had a sketch pinned to her coat, a bird with its wings thrown wide as if reaching for a bus. "Phoenixes don't use lifts," she said, not even out of breath.

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We worked through a week of evenings. The walls were still black near the top from the smoke, so she started at the bottom, where the soot had been scrubbed to grey, and built the head first, a sharp orange crest over a neck that curved like a question. Each night the neighbours came out onto the landings to watch: Mr Dhillon with his radio, the Ramsay twins with their scooters left against the door. Nobody asked why she had picked a bird that burns.

On the last night she painted the tail. It ran down past the windows in long red feathers, turning turquoise wherever the light from the car park caught it. She stopped at the ninth floor, where the fire had started, and dabbed three small flowers into the curl. "Those are for the people who got out," she said. "Not the bins. The people."

In the morning the caretaker came up with a bucket and stood looking at it for a long time. He did not scrub it. Instead he left the stairwell light on all night, so the bird was lit from below, and when I came home from my shift the whole wall was warm with colour, as if the block had decided to wake up.