Colour hummingbird tattoo with an outline flower and black dots on a forearm, shown in three angled views.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hummingbird and flower on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A green and blue hummingbird in mid-flight fills the forearm, with its wings spread and beak pointing right. Its body is shaded with blocks of green, yellow and orange, and a black line drawn flower sits behind it on a yellow background. Black dots trail down from the bottom edge, and the three panels show the same arm from different angles.

Neo-trad Dotwork Forearm Hummingbird Bird Flower Dot Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find the hummingbird wedged behind the net curtain in Room Four the morning after the gale has stripped the geraniums off the sill. Mrs Ovenden, who has run Marram House for thirty-one years, says it came in through the sash the night the boarders argued over the wireless. You don't believe her, but the bird is real enough, green as bottle glass at the throat and blue where the light catches its back, and it keeps trying to fly through a window that isn't there.

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You cup it in a tea towel and carry it down the stairs past the hall clock. Outside, the sky over the harbour has gone the colour of weak custard, and the sea is still sulking in the dregs of the storm. Mrs Ovenden follows with a saucer of sugar water, sweetened with the last of the honey from the shed. The bird ignores it, then doesn't. Its tongue flicks out like a thread drawn through cloth, and for a moment the whole kitchen smells of hot tin and clover.

When it finally lifts, it doesn't go for the sea. It circles the hollyhocks by the back wall, then the buttercups along the cliff path, stitching the air in tight loops, and drops a grey feather onto your sleeve. Mrs Ovenden pockets the feather and says nothing about the rent.

Next morning the tide has left a trail of black pebbles up the slipway, each no bigger than a pinprick. You walk along them the way the bird must have gone, counting the stops, until the trail runs out at the sea wall where the wind is already turning.