Black line drawing of a stylised phoenix with swirling wings and a flowing tail on a white background, shown as a tattoo design without a body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stylised phoenix line design

Black and grey · Flash

The image shows a stylised phoenix with outstretched wings, a head with a curved crest, and a long tail that ends in scrolling flourishes. It is drawn in black linework of varying thickness on a plain white background. There is no shading or colour, and the design is centred and symmetrical.

Phoenix Bird Wing Swirl Flourish Tail Crest

Find an artist for this

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, you, where the lamp can reach your face. My grandmother told this one on the Tanami road when the dust came in sideways and the drivers stopped to pray or swear, whichever they had the breath for. There was a fuel depot at Papunya then, a tin shed with a radio that only picked up the football, and a girl named Ruth Akerman who kept its ledger because her father had lost his eyes to fever. She wrote every litre down in pencil, every name, every debt, and she never once let a man leave owing less than the truth.

Keep reading

One night a stranger came in on foot, his boots gone to ribbon, carrying a birdcage with nothing inside but a feather and a spoon of ash. He said the bird had been burned out of a shearing shed further north, that it had gone up in flames and come down again in the same spot, and that each time it rose it left a little more of itself behind on the wind. Ruth asked what he owed. He said he had come to settle a debt that was not his, and he would not say whose. She poured him water and wrote nothing down.

In the morning there was a line of pencil marks on the ledger page where she had not written, curling out from the margin like smoke, and at the end of them a tail that spiralled into a scroll of flourishes, the way the old carriers used to sign their names. The stranger was gone. The cage was gone. Ruth never said what the debt was, only that she still keeps the page, and that when the wind comes off the sand it smells faintly of burning, and that a bird with a crest like a question mark is always circling somewhere above the road, waiting for someone to pay what they owe.