Black and grey fine line hummingbird above the elbow with a botanical vine of flowers and berries running down the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hummingbird and blossom vine on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A hummingbird in flight sits near the elbow, with its wings and beak outlined in fine black linework and lightly shaded. A thin botanical vine with small flowers, buds and clustered berries climbs from the wrist up towards the elbow, with leaves drawn in delicate line and grey shading. The work is entirely black and grey, and the composition follows the length of the arm.

Fine line Botanical Forearm Hummingbird Bird Flower Berry Vine Branch Leaves Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mistress Orla Penhallow had been counting the same bramble for three days when the hummingbird came back to it, hovering at the glasshouse glass as if it had an appointment. The kingdom of Vell kept its gardens behind walls for exactly this reason: nothing that flew into Vell was supposed to be let out again.

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Her father had planted the blackberry vine the spring the old king lost the eastern provinces, and it had grown wild up the north wall, sending runners through the cracked panes until the gardeners gave up pruning. Now its flowers were pale as tallow and the berries clustered dark and hard, and the bird ignored every sweet thing the gardeners hung for it and went straight to the vine.

On the fourth morning Orla propped the door with a brick and left it open. She sat on the step with her sketchbook and a pencil worn to a stub, and drew the bird as it fed, its wings a blur she could only capture by drawing the blur itself. The vine she drew slowly, leaf by leaf, following the stem down past the bench to the cold flagstones where it had rooted, as if it wanted to leave the glass altogether.

When the bird finally lifted through the doorway it did not go over the wall. It circled once above her head, dipped its beak towards the sketchbook, and was gone into the grey sky over the palace roofs. Orla looked down at her drawing. She had sketched the bird so closely it seemed to hang on the paper, and beside it, climbing out of the margin, was a single bramble runner she had not meant to draw at all.