Tribal-style phoenix design with outstretched wings and a long tail, drawn in black and dark red linework on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal phoenix with outstretched wings

Mixed · Flash

A stylised phoenix with spread wings, a small head and a long, sweeping tail, drawn as tapering tribal-style lines. The strokes are black with dark red edging and no shading, and the design sits centred on a plain white background.

Phoenix Bird Wing Feather Tail

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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 down, you lot, and mind the wet on that step. Nobody on this quay will tell you the bird came first, because the bird never comes first. It was the pilchard cellar that burned, the winter the Marigold went down off Gull Rock with four men aboard, and the smoke went up so black the gulls wouldn't fly through it.

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Old Eliza Hocking, the skipper's widow, stood on the harbour wall with a lamp and watched that smoke stand up in the shape of wings. Its head was no bigger than a fist, and it had a way of turning towards the harbour mouth, as if it were counting boats. Every night that week she climbed the wall and lit her lamp, and every night the thing came back to the water's edge and cried like a kettle left on the hob.

On the last night the gale dropped. The bird came low over the bar, its long tail trailing sparks across the swell, and it dipped once above the lifeboat slip. Eliza swore afterwards that she saw four lamps come up behind it in the dark, one after another, following it in past the rocks.

Four men walked up that slip in the morning, soaked to the bone and furious at being rowed home by a fire. Nobody on this quay could ever say whether the bird was a warning or a guide. Me, I reckon it was only smoke that had learned where home was. Now mind that tide, it's turning, and that bird has never once let a man drown on a turning tide.