Watercolour phoenix design in orange, red and teal with spread wings and swirling fire-like tail feathers, shown as a drawing on white paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour phoenix in flame colours

Colour · Flash

A phoenix with spread wings and a raised head stands on a pale background, with a long curling tail that ends in flame-like swirls. The bird is painted in loose watercolour strokes, with dark talons and fine ink outlines on the wings and claws. The palette runs from orange and red through yellow to teal and green, and the figure fills most of the tall, portrait-shaped page.

Phoenix Bird Fire Feather Talon Wing Flame

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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

You wake before the cut has frozen and find the stove dead, its ash grey as a pigeon's back. Your father always said the Marigold Pell kept her fire through anything, so you kneel on the cold boards and blow until your cheeks ache. Nothing. Only a single lump of coal is left, wrapped in yesterday's Yorkshire Post under the bench, and you hold it the way he taught you, like an egg that might still hatch.

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The bird on the cabin side was painted the summer before he died, by a man who worked the locks between Leeds and Shipley and drank his wages in the Fleece. It is a phoenix, mostly, though the artist got its tail wrong: the feathers spiral off into curls of flame, orange and gold running down to teal where the water catches them. Your father used to say the bird was not a sign of anything, only paint, and then he would tap the painted beak with one knuckle as if to wake it.

You walk the towpath with the coal in your coat pocket as far as Esholt, where the lock-keeper's cottage still has a range that smokes. Mrs Oddie takes one look at your face and at the wrapped coal and says nothing, only rakes out her grate and hands you the bellows. The flame catches on the third breath, a small hot tongue that climbs the kindling as if it has been waiting all winter for permission.

When you get back, the Pell's chimney is already breathing smoke. Someone has been sitting on the roof rail in the dark, watching the water, and when you step aboard the stove door stands open and the room is warm. The painted bird on the side looks, in the lamplight, as if it has turned its head to see who lit it.