Black ink flash design of a hummingbird feeding from a scrolled flower, with music notes and script lettering along the stem.

Hummingbird and flower scroll with music notes

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A hummingbird hovers at the right, its long beak reaching into a scrolled, leaf-like flower. Three music notes float in the space between bird and bloom, and a flowing ornamental stem with cursive script trails down the left side. The drawing uses dark, sketchy linework with hatched shading on the wing and tail feathers and no colour.

Botanical Lettering Hummingbird Flower Music note Scrollwork Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fiddler's bow snapped the night before the wedding, and there was no one else in the valley who could play the tune the bride had chosen. Her mother cried into the bread dough. Her father went out to the lane and shouted at the hedges, which is how he came to be standing in the wild rose when a small bird dropped out of the air, hung there with its long beak at his ear, and asked what the trouble was.

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He told it. The bird listened with its head on one side and said it could play, though it wanted paying in a currency the father did not have. Not coin, not cider. It wanted the first note of the dance to be its own, and every wedding after that in the family to hear the same three notes, quick as dropped stitches, drifting over the table. The father agreed before he had thought it through, which is what fathers in these stories always do.

The bird went ahead of him to the barn. It perched on a scrolled iron hook where the honeysuckle grew thick, and when the bride stepped out in her grey dress, the bird opened its beak and the music came down like a sieve of light. Guests said afterwards they had seen the notes themselves, small and black, turning over the rafters before they fell like petals into the cups.

At dusk the bird flew off over the stubble without a word. The father found the bride's bouquet on the step, tied with a strip of the same ribbon that trailed from the hook, and he hummed the three notes to himself on the way home, as he has done at every family wedding since, though none of them can say where the tune began.