Drawing of a phoenix with spread black and grey wings, a red rose at its breast and red petals falling around it, on aged paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Phoenix with spread wings and red rose

Mixed · Flash

A bird with spread wings, which may be a phoenix, is drawn with a delicate head and trailing feathers. Its black and grey feathers are shaded with fine lines and soft tones, with thin loops encircling the body. A large red rose sits at the centre, with loose red petals drifting above, all set against a textured, off-white background.

Phoenix Bird Wing Feather Rose Petal Hoop Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the second week of painting the hoarding, the ash-coloured paint has started to crack in the cold, and Mr Dunn from the council keeps standing under your ladder with his hat in his hands, asking when the bird will look like a bird and not a burnt coat hanger. You tell him when it's finished. You have three tins of black, a brush worn to a point, and a rose Mrs Ada Lowe cut from her wall before dawn and set in a jam jar on the trestle, its petals already loosening.

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The Palais went up in February, the sprung floor, the gilt balcony, all of it, and the town has been walking round the hole in the High Street as if it might fill with water. Ada wants the rose at the bird's breast. She says her Stan danced his last waltz under that roof and she would like something red left standing over the place. You tell her roses are easy to paint badly. She says so are husbands, and laughs until she has to hold the ladder.

You work the wings last, one feather at a time, dragging the brush so each black quill tapers to nothing. The loops you draw around the body take three goes. On the third, a squall comes in off the moor and the board swells, and you think it's ruined, but when the light goes gold at six the hoops catch it and seem to turn slowly on their own.

A boy in a school jumper stands on the kerb and asks whether it's going to fly off. You tell him it has already flown off once and this is only where it landed. Ada looks up at the rose, dry and bright over the rubble, and a single petal lets go and drifts down past your shoulder into the street.