Blue ink drawing of a phoenix with spread feathered wings and a tail curling into a scroll-like swirl, shown as a tattoo design on white paper.

Phoenix with spread wings and swirling tail

Colour · Flash

A stylised phoenix with large, spread wings and a crest of feathers on its head, drawn in blue-violet ink on white paper. The wings and body are built from dense hatched linework and shading, while the long tail curls down into an ornamental swirl at the base. The image is centred on a plain white background with the design filling most of the frame.

Phoenix Bird Wing Feather Swirl Tail

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the oven's still warming and the flour hasn't settled on the sill yet. You'll want to hear this before the first trays come out, because the bird in it doesn't wait for anyone. My grandmother's grandmother kept a bakehouse on Tanner Lane in Leeds, and she swore the ash raked from her ovens each morning had feathers in it.

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Every night the fire was banked and every morning the ash went into a bucket for the allotments. One winter the baker's boy, Tobias Greer, couldn't sleep for the cold, so he crept down to the back room and found the grate still glowing. Something in the embers had folded its wings. Blue-black, the colour of a bruise going off, with a crest of feathers lifting from its head like smoke off a wet match. It turned its eye to him and said nothing, only curled its long tail round a coal the way a cat tucks itself by the hearth.

He fed it. Not bread, which it refused with a look, but the hot heel of the day's crust, pinched off and set on the bricks. Each dawn the bird was smaller, and each dawn it grew a feather more, until one morning the flour dust shivered, the shutters rattled, and the whole place smelled of scorched sugar and rain. The bird stood on the peel, stretched its wings the width of the room, and rose up through the flue.

Tobias found one feather on the step, warm as a loaf. He kept it pressed inside the order ledger for the rest of his days. Mind the tray, love, it's hot.