Black line drawing of a hummingbird with ornate swirling filigree wings feeding from a curling flower, shown as a flash design with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hummingbird and swirling flower design

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A hummingbird in profile, with a long beak reaching towards a curling, trumpet-shaped flower. The wings and body are filled with ornamental scrollwork and small loops, while stems and dots trail across the lower half of the composition. The design is drawn in black linework on a white background, with no shading or colour.

Fine line Dotwork Botanical Hummingbird Flower Swirl Filigree Wing Dot Scrollwork Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the third hour above the tarn, my mule had lain down in the scree and would not be argued with. I unloaded the silver, left the poor beast a handful of barley and a curse, and went on up the pass with the pack on my back and my uncle's letter buttoned inside my coat. The letter said only: bring the scales, and do not stop at the cross.

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The cross had lost both its arms to weather, and from the stump a plant had rooted in a crack in the rock. Its flowers were trumpets, pale and curled at the lip like the end of a violin scroll, and a hummingbird hung in front of them with its wings going so fast they turned to a blur of lace. I stopped. I had been told not to, and the bird did not care. It drank, flicked its needle beak at me, and was gone over the lip of the pass in a spatter of dew that landed on my sleeve in small dark dots.

I had expected the scales to weigh something. I unstrapped them and set them on the cairn, and the wind moved through their brass arms and made them rock, empty, which is what they had always been for. My uncle was a silversmith who had spent forty years weighing what other people called precious, and he had sent me up a mountain with the one instrument that could not tell me anything.

I left them there for the next walker, who would probably curse them as I had cursed the mule. Below me the bird was already at another flower, cutting loops through the air as if it had been drawing them all along, and for the first time since the valley I did not feel the pack's weight at all.