Illustrated pink, purple and blue hummingbird in flight beside a caption saying a hummingbird tattoo represents overcoming difficult times.

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Hummingbird design with caption text

Colour · Flash

A stylised hummingbird in flight is drawn with a long beak, a purple head and wings in pink, purple and pale blue. Smooth, flat shapes and soft gradients define the body and feathers, with no visible shading. Italic caption text on a beige background reads that a hummingbird tattoo represents overcoming difficult times.

Hummingbird Feather Beak

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sugar water had frozen twice before I thought to bring the feeder into the kitchen, and by then the hummingbird had stopped coming to the yard at all. Dad said it would be gone south by Christmas, or dead in the hedge, and he said it the way he said most things about the farm in January, flat and without looking up from the ledger.

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But on the third morning of the hard frost it was sitting on the handle of the milk churn in the cold porch, its purple throat flashing whenever the light caught it, its long beak tipped at the ceiling as if it were reading the cobwebs. Its wings were the colour of the sky over the top field at dusk, pink and violet and a pale blue that had no business in Lincolnshire in February. Mrs Ashdown at the garden centre in town reckoned it had escaped from someone's glasshouse, some bird let loose in the autumn, and that such things rarely lasted a winter.

I warmed the last of Mum's honey in a pan on the range and dipped the spoon, holding my breath as though the bird might be frightened of me, which was ridiculous, because it was not interested in me at all. It drank, it shivered, it rose and hung in the air in front of my face like something pinned there. Then it slipped out through the gap in the door into the white yard and climbed over the silos, and I stood with a dripping spoon feeling foolish and oddly glad.

It came back every morning after that, and by March Dad had stopped saying anything about it, though he had started leaving the porch door propped open a crack. I still don't know if it was the same bird that came through the frost. It doesn't matter much. Something small and stubborn kept finding the honey, and that was enough to be going on with.