Red and black phoenix tattoo with spread wings and long trailing tail feathers on the side of a person's ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red phoenix on the ribs

Neo-trad · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A phoenix rises with its wings spread wide and its head turned upward, with long tail feathers trailing down. The bird is outlined in black, with red fills that shade from bright red to darker tones along the wings. The tattoo sits centrally on the side of the ribs against a plain, light skin tone, with a white top at the upper edge of the frame.

Neo-trad Ribs Phoenix Bird Wing Feather Tail feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The night porter at Saint Ebba's kept a tin of matches in his breast pocket, though the wards had run on electric light since before he was born. Ask him why and he would tell you about the bird. His grandmother had seen it sit on the laundry roof the winter the old wing burned, and it had lifted out of the smoke red as a coal, wings open, neck raised, its long tail trailing behind as if it were pulling something good up after it.

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One February night the storm took the power out on the third floor. Sister Agnes ran her torch down the corridor and found a boy of six in bed nine, too still, with the call cord hanging just out of reach. The porter came up the back stairs two at a time. Nobody could say afterwards what he did with the matches, only that he struck them one after another and held them up at the end of the bed so the nurses could see to the drip, and that each one burned a little longer than a match ought to.

By four the generator caught and the lights came up. The boy was asleep with his colour back. Agnes found the porter sitting on a linen trolley with the empty tin in his lap, and asked where he had learned that trick. He said nobody had taught him. He said he had only ever seen the bird once, from the yard, and that was enough to know how it went.

The laundry had been rebuilt in brick long ago, but on its roof, low down in the mortar, someone had scratched a bird with its wings spread. The rain had worn most of it away, and still the tail feathers were plain enough to find in the morning light.