Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Phoenix with spread wings

Colour · Flash

A phoenix is shown in flight with its wings fully spread upward and outward, and its head turned forward. Its long tail feathers stream downward and taper into flame-like shapes. The bold, tapering linework is filled with a smooth gradient running from red and orange at the tail and wingtips, through purple, to blue at the centre of the body, on a plain white background.

Phoenix Wing Feather Tail Flame Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

On Ness Holm the boatmen kept one rule above the rest: no net was burned on the Sabbath, for the smoke would call up the bird that lives under the Stacks. Ada Corrie broke it the October her husband's boat went out past the reef and did not come back. She stacked the tarred nets on the headland, struck a match with cold fingers, and watched the black smoke climb.

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The bird came down out of the cloud as if the cloud had caught fire. Its wings opened wider than the cliff and its head came forward, bright as a poker, and its tail poured down behind it in long fire-coloured feathers. Where the tips brushed the rocks they were red and orange, and where the tail touched the water it went blue, the deep blue of the sea at the edge of night. It did not speak. It only waited, so Ada spoke for both of them.

'Bring me back what the sea took,' she said. The bird lowered its head and dipped its tail into the swell. The water hissed and turned violet, and out of the glow came the ringing of a brass bell, the one that hung on her husband's bow, sounding slow and steady as if a hand under the waves were rocking it. Then the light went out of the water and the bird was gone into the dusk.

The bell was all that came home. Ada hung it by the door, and every evening when the tide came up the shingle it caught the last of the sun, first gold, then red, then blue as the water drew back. The fishwives said that was enough for a widow on Ness Holm, and Ada, who had asked for more, learned to say so too.