Stylised phoenix with spread wings

Black and grey · Flash

A bold black silhouette of a stylised bird, likely a phoenix, with its head raised at the centre and wings spread wide on both sides. The wings are built from long, sweeping feather shapes outlined in thick black lines with inner white contours. The design is solid black and white with no shading or colour, and it fills the frame symmetrically.

Phoenix Bird Wing Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last of the August bonfire had been smouldering since Tuesday, and Dad said a fire that old had earned the right to be left alone. Every evening I raked the ash back over the bricks, and every morning it was still there, a red eye under the grey, waiting for a draught. We had cut the Discovery and Worcester trees hard that summer after the wasps got into the fruit, and the brash was piled higher than the tractor cab.

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On the Saturday the wind came round from the west and got under the heap. I had the hose ready and no intention of using it. The sparks went up in a column, and then, because the air over the orchard was hot and the wind was steady, they split into two long sheets that leaned out over the rows the way swifts lean into a gale. Mrs Abbott from the cottage at the bottom of the lane came up the track with a torch and stood beside me with her hands in her cardigan pockets, saying nothing at all for a full minute.

"That's how it went in 1976," she said eventually. "Your grandfather used to say the fire had to be let out of the trees before it could be let out of the field." I didn't understand her, and she didn't explain. She only pointed with her chin at the place where the smoke had thinned, where the ash was falling in feathers and settling on the wet grass without setting anything alight.

By dawn the heap was black and cold, and I had written nothing in the spraying book. I tucked the charred bricks back into the wall and walked up to the top row to look at the Bramleys. Their leaves were scorched at the edges, curled like the tips of a wing, and under them every apple had kept its colour. Some things, I suppose, are only burned on the outside.