Colour tattoo of a phoenix with spread wings and a peacock-feather tail in a soft watercolour style, on the side of a person's ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour phoenix on the side ribs

Ribs · Colour · Photo

A phoenix rises with outstretched wings, its head turned to the right and its long tail ending in peacock-style eye patterns. The linework is loose and feathered, with soft, blended shading and splashes of pink, orange, yellow and blue that fade into the surrounding skin. The bird fills most of the frame against a pale, unmarked background of skin.

Ribs Phoenix Bird Wing Feather Peacock feather Splash Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had shut the Hollin Pass road on the third day of Advent, and by the fifth the common room of the Drover's Rest had burned down to a single red eye under the ash. Maud Tarrant kept that coal alive in a clay pot, as her mother had and her mother's mother before her, and she did not let the guests touch it.

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On the sixth night the shutter at the top of the stair blew open and something came in on the wind. It was a bird as long as a man's arm, its wings the colour of a wet sunset, pink running into orange and orange into a blue like river ice. Its tail trailed down the stairs behind it, every feather ending in a dark eye. The carter's boy swore it was a peacock stolen from some lord's garden. Maud only said, "Mind the pot."

The bird walked to the hearth and looked at the coal with its head tilted to the right, the way a bird looks at a worm it has not yet decided to trust. Then it opened its wings over the ash. Nobody in the room breathed. The coal woke, then the kindling, then the whole grate, and the bird rose up the chimney in a column of light, leaving one feather to smoulder on the hearthstone.

In the morning the road was clear to the pass, and the snow lay in a ring around the inn as if something had walked a circle in it and gone. The feather was still warm when Maud picked it up. Its eyes had turned to the door, and they stayed that way, watching the road south until the spring thaw.