Black and white line drawing of a phoenix with outstretched wings and a flowing flame-like tail, shown as a tattoo design on a plain background.

Phoenix with spread wings and flame tail

Black and grey · Flash

A bird resembling a phoenix is shown mid-flight with its wings raised high and its head turned to the left. The feathers and flame-like tail are rendered in fine black linework with hatching and solid line accents on a white background. The design is entirely black ink with no colour, and the composition fills a tall, narrow space.

Phoenix Bird Wing Feather Flame Tail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The coal had gone black in the forward hold on the ninth day out from Valparaíso, and by the time Ruth Penrose got the hatch open the smoke had already found the sails. The captain wanted the fire drowned and the saltpetre sealed under tarpaulin. Ruth wanted to see what the cook had seen, a bird with its wings thrown up like a spread mainsail, standing on the rail in the grey light and watching her with one bright eye.

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Nobody believed Tobiah when he said the thing had walked out of the smoke. The bosun laughed, the mate crossed himself, and the surgeon asked whether he had been at the rum. Ruth only noticed that the gulls kept clear of the rail and that the air above the hatch shivered like heat off a galley stove. She climbed the ratlines with a bucket of brine and found the bird perched on the topgallant yard, its tail a long curl of feathers that shifted from soot to a thin red edge wherever the light caught them.

"Go on, then," she said, and tipped the bucket over the rail. The bird did not flinch. It opened its beak, and the sound that came out was not a squawk but a sigh, like a bellows let go. Then it shook out its wings, the wind filled the canvas from underneath, and the smoke in the hold thinned away to nothing.

By the time they raised the Cape, the cargo was dry, the captain had stopped mentioning the fire, and Ruth kept a shovel of cinders in her locker out of habit. Every morning there was a single feather on her bunk, flame-edged and light as paper. She swept each one into the sea, until the last morning, when it lay warm against her palm. This time she tucked it into the cinders, and watched the grey ash take a small red breath.