Pencil drawing of a phoenix with outstretched wings and flowing tail feathers, shown as a tattoo design without a body placement.

Phoenix with spread wings

Black and grey · Flash

A phoenix is drawn with its wings fully spread and its head facing forward, with a crest of feathers rising above it. The wings and chest are shaded with layered pencil strokes that suggest individual feathers, while the long tail sweeps downward into tapering, flame-like plumes. The drawing is on plain white paper, in black and grey pencil only.

Phoenix Bird Wing Feather Flame Tail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pass at Cwm Ddu had one inn, one well and one rule, which the innkeeper's widow, Morwen Pryce, repeated to every carter who came up the road in the snow. Do not light a fire after dark on the north side of the ridge. Her husband had broken that rule the winter the bridge washed out, and the fire he lit had drawn something down off the peaks that took the barn and both horses before the thaw.

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In the spring a girl came up the valley road alone, carrying a tin lantern and a sack of ash. Her name was Ffion and she had walked from the coast, she said, because she had been told a bird lived on the ridge that could be asked for one favour. Morwen laughed at her and then, because the girl would not sleep until someone listened, sent her to the old quarry above the scree where the snow never lay.

She came back at dusk with her hair singed white at the ends and a single grey feather pinned to her collar. The bird had not wanted to speak, she said. It had only wanted to know whether anyone still remembered the fire, and when she told it that Morwen's husband was dead and the rule was kept, it spread its wings so wide they filled the whole pass and then folded them away again, and the snow on the road began to melt in a straight line from the inn to the sea.

Morwen still tells this to carters, though she never says whether the bird came back. She only points at the feather, which hangs above the hearth now, and says that the north side of the ridge is safe for anyone who keeps the fire low and goes to bed early.