Colourful hummingbird tattoo on an ankle, with painterly orange, red and teal wings and a long purple tail curling down the leg.

Colourful hummingbird with swirling tail on ankle

Ankle · Colour · Photo

A hummingbird in flight, shown in profile with its wings raised, sits above a long, tapering tail that curls into a spiral and trails down the ankle and heel. The bird is shaded with soft, blended orange, red, purple and teal tones, while the tail is drawn with thinner, darker linework. The subject fills the frame against a plain pale background, with the foot and ankle visible.

Ankle Hummingbird Bird Swirl Tail Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down, you're letting the draught in. Aye, that's the back parlour, mind the coal scuttle. My mother kept this house on Carrick Head for forty years, and the thing I'll tell you about happened the winter the ship came in from Valparaiso with its hold full of ferns and nothing else.

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The bird came out of the crates while the dockers were unloading. Nobody saw it leave the hold. It was sitting on the rim of the washbasin the next morning, no bigger than a thimble, the colour of marmalade on the wing and a teal like the sea off the point when the sun gets under it. Mother said it had come to find a room, the way guests do, so she gave it the attic over the stairs because it had the best light.

It stayed the whole season. Every morning it went out over the cliff path and came back with its tail trailing behind, a long ribbon of plum and red that curled at the end like a fiddle scroll whenever it hovered at the window. Mother swore the tail was longer in April than it had been in January. Tom Pascoe, who mended the nets and believed nothing he had not caught, said it was only the light.

In October the bird stopped coming down to the kitchen for sugar water. We found it in the attic on the morning of the first gale, perched on the sill and facing the sea, its tail wound three times round the latch as if it had tied itself on. Mother left the window open. By noon the bird was gone and the latch was loose, and the spiral was still there on the sill in a fine dust of gold.