Colour tattoo of a phoenix with spread wings and long streaming tail feathers in red, orange, yellow and blue, with stars, on a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Phoenix with trailing stars on upper back

Neo-trad · Back · Colour · Photo

A phoenix with outstretched wings and a head turned to the side is the central subject, rising over the upper back and shoulder blade. Fine outlines and soft shading give the feathers depth, and long tail plumes curl downward in red, orange, yellow and blue. Small five-pointed stars in blue, red and white trail across the composition, and the background is out of focus.

Neo-trad Back Phoenix Bird Wing Feather Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The shepherds on the Hollin Pass had a rule that nobody lit a fire above the second cairn after dark, because the wind came up the scree and carried the sparks wherever it liked. Old Teodor broke the rule the winter his wife's lamb went missing in the snow. He sat by a small blaze of gorse and cursed the mountain until his voice gave out.

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Something answered him from the dark. It was a bird the size of a door, its wings still smoking at the tips, and it came down on the rock like a dropped coat. Its tail was long and ran in ribbons of red, gold and river blue. Where the ribbons dragged across the snow, small stars were left behind, pale ones and blue ones, hanging in the cold air a while before they sank.

"You are burning my nest," the bird said, quite politely. "Put it out, or we will both be cold."

Teodor did not put it out. He asked what it wanted, and the bird said it had come to see who was still awake on the pass. Nobody had asked it anything in three hundred years. So they talked until the fire was ash, and in the morning the lamb was standing by the cairn, and the stars were still scattered across the frost, going out one by one as the sun came over the ridge.

Teodor kept the rule after that, mostly. Every January he climbed to the second cairn with a little gorse and a tin of matches. He struck one and waited, and sometimes, far above, a red shape would turn against the cloud and trail its light down the mountain for him to see.