Black tribal-style phoenix with outstretched wings and flowing tail feathers, drawn as a tattoo design on a plain white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal phoenix design in flight

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A bold black outline drawing of a phoenix or bird in flight, with wings spread wide and long, tapering tail plumes curling below. The linework is heavy and solid, with areas of fine dotted stippling in the body and wing shading. The design is black only on a white background, with no colour and no body part shown.

Blackwork Phoenix Bird Wing Feather Tail feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom,

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We pulled into the field at Sandbach on Tuesday with the rain already coming sideways, and Dad wouldn't let anyone touch the bird until the lamps were lit. You remember the bird. It sits on top of the organ at the front of the Gallopers, black as a stove, with the paint gone to nothing but the ribs of the wings, and every winter Dad says he'll strip it and every spring he says the next town will do.

Last Thursday a gust took the canvas off the Cakewalk and the poles went over like skittles. Mrs Harte's boy broke his wrist. Dad sat on the running board all night with a tin of black enamel and a brush no thicker than a hair, doing the long tail feathers over again, the curls where they lift away from the body. He wouldn't say who taught him the pattern. I think it was Granddad, who drew it on the back of a ticket stub in 1961 and swore it was a phoenix, though it looked to me like a kite with opinions.

Yesterday the generator caught on the third pull and the lights ran round the top of the wheel, and the bird, which I've never once seen move, seemed to shift its weight forward on the pole. Mum says it's the damp. Dad said nothing and kept his hand on the brass rail a long while after the music stopped.

Come up for the August fair. Bring your own brush. There's a space by the dodgems that's been waiting for you since you were nine.

Love, Nell