Black tribal-style line drawing of a phoenix with outstretched wings and a long, swirling tail, shown as a flash design on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal phoenix flash design

Black and grey · Flash

A phoenix with wings spread upward and a long head held forward, drawn as bold black tribal-style linework. The wings and tail are built from tapering strokes and curling swirls, with the tail feathers flowing down the lower half of the image. The design is shown in solid black on a plain white background.

Phoenix Bird Wing Feather Swirl Tail Flame

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Mags, you will laugh when you hear what Dorrie Pyle did on Tuesday. She climbed the water tower behind the Co-op with a tin of black paint and a brush from her late husband's shed, and she painted a bird on the side facing the railway line. The council man came round Wednesday morning with a face like a wet Sunday, but when he saw it he just stood there with his hat in his hands, same as the rest of us did. It is a phoenix, all sweeping wings and a neck like a question mark, and the tail spills down the tank in curls that look like smoke or like water coming off a roof.

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You remember Dorrie's Harold went into the pit at Ashworth the spring the wireless was full of the Coronation. She has not been out of her front door since the funeral except to buy stamps. Yet there she was on the ladder at six in the morning, and Mrs Clegg swears she heard her singing Abide With Me, though I think that must be Mrs Clegg's imagination, she has always been a great one for imagining things.

I went up to see her on Thursday with a jar of the damson jam she likes. She was sitting on her back step, paint under her fingernails, and she said the bird was not for Harold. It was for the line of women who had to stand at the pithead gates every morning waiting on the lamp men to say whose name had come up. She said a phoenix is only a bird that has been burned and got up anyway, and that she had got tired of waiting for someone to paint it for them.

I am writing this on the back of the rent book because I could not find my good paper. Come up on the bus at the weekend. You will see it from the bus stop, the wings catch the sun about half past three. Bring your reading glasses, it is harder to make out than it looks from the road.