A red-brown line tattoo of a stylised phoenix with a curled tail, sitting on the side of the ribs.

Stylised phoenix with swirl tail on ribs

Ribs · Colour · Photo

A stylised bird, likely a phoenix, is drawn in a single reddish-brown ink with flowing wing feathers and a long curved tail that ends in a spiral. The lines are smooth and even with little shading, set against a close crop of pale skin. The design sits in the centre of the frame with the body curving away at the edges.

Ribs Phoenix Bird Wing Feather Swirl Tail Spiral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The inspector had already stamped the form when old Matthias laid the tracing on my counter again. It was a bird, or the idea of one: a single line of rust-coloured ink lifting from a wing, the neck bent back, a tail that wound down and finished in a spiral so tight I could have threaded a needle with it. He said his granddaughter had drawn it the night before the train left Graz. He said it was a phoenix. I told him customs did not stamp birds.

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The rule was simple enough. Nothing that could not be declared, nothing that could be sold in the valley for more than it cost to carry. Matthias had a sack of walnuts, two bottles of plum schnapps and a painting of a woman in a blue hat wrapped in newspaper. I had let the schnapps go. The bird I could not decide about. Paper was paper, but the line was so steady, as though the hand had known exactly where it was going and had never once needed to look back.

Outside, the rain came sideways over the barrier. Behind me the radio hissed the Italian weather. I looked at the spiral again and thought of my father's hand, which shook by the end, and how he never managed a line like that in his life. I asked Matthias what the bird was for. He shrugged and said it was for going somewhere and coming back different.

I stamped the tracing with the blue ink I was not supposed to use on paper, waved him through, and left the bird on the counter for the rest of my shift, where the tail kept its slow, tight curl under the lamp like something that had found the one place it meant to end.