Flash sheet of five solid black, tribal-style hummingbirds in flight on a white background, a design suited to a tattoo.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Five tribal hummingbirds in flight

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

Five hummingbirds are arranged across a white page in different flying poses, with the largest bird at lower left. The birds are drawn with bold solid black shapes and sweeping curved feather patterns, with negative white lines separating the wings and tails. The image is entirely black on white with no shading or colour.

Blackwork Hummingbird Bird Wing Feather Flight

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The first hummingbird came aboard off the Azores, a speck of green-black fury hanging in the rigging as if it had forgotten which way was north. Dunstan the cook swore it was a bad omen. Ada Renfrew, who kept the ship's log because the captain's hand had gone to palsy, wrote it down anyway, since nothing else had happened for nineteen days but grey water and the creak of the main yard.

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By the second week there were five. They roosted in the lee of the galley chimney where the warmth came up, and at dawn they took sugar from the tip of a knife Ada held out, quick and furious as needles. The men stopped calling them vermin. Old Hobbs, who had sailed the Spanish Main as a boy, said he had once seen birds like these hang over a blossom in a town called Quetzal Bay, and he would say no more about it than that.

On the twenty-third day the wind backed hard into the south-west and the sea rose up like a field of black ploughland. The birds did not shelter. They lifted together off the rail and went straight into the squall, wings blurring, and Ada lost them in the rain before she could count them twice.

When the sky cleared at noon, a smudge of brown cliff showed to the east. Ada, wedging the log under her arm, saw five small shapes wheeling above it, then turning back towards the ship's wake. She wrote the bearing down. In the margin, where the captain would not look, she added that the birds had been steering us all along.