Hand-drawn sketch of a hummingbird feeding from a purple iris with pink and teal ink splashes, shown as a tattoo design in a sketchbook.

Hummingbird and iris tattoo design

Botanical · Mixed · Flash

A hummingbird with a long beak and sweeping black tail feathers hovers beside a large purple iris. The bird is drawn with fine black linework and stippled shading, while the flower and surrounding splashes use purple, pink and teal marker or ink. The composition is loose and asymmetric, with the subject placed on the upper right of a blank page and a trailing teal line running down the left.

Botanical Hummingbird Bird Flower Iris Splash Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bird is back before you have pegged out the second sheet, a dark blur that stops dead above the bean rows and hangs there with its needle beak aimed at the iris you planted in the cart ruts last spring. Nobody in Hale's End keeps hummingbirds. They come up the lane from the forest every August, drawn by the purple flags that grow nowhere else, and your grandmother always swore they were carrying colour out over the hills to paint the far side of the world.

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You take the jar and follow it. The path runs past the last cottage gardens, where the stone wall gives out and the oaks begin, and the bird keeps just ahead, stopping on every low branch as if it has been told you are slow. Beyond the trunks a stream the colour of old bottle glass runs over the roots, and the iris stand in a ragged clearing, their petals speckled white and splashed with pink where the light comes through.

The bird drops into the clearing and its tail trails behind it, black and loose, leaving long strokes across the grass. Where the feathers brush a flower, the petals darken and bloom again, violet at the throat. You kneel with the jar and understand you were never meant to take anything. You fill it with the teal water, and the bird watches you with one bright eye, then sweeps up past the oaks and out over the hedges.

That evening your fingers are stained purple to the second knuckle and there is a single black feather on the back step, long as your forearm and cold to the touch. Down the lane someone has tied a pink cloth to the mill gate, and the whole village is talking about it. You keep the feather in the window where the last of the sun can reach it.