Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hummingbird feeding from a dark flower

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A solid black hummingbird hovers on the left, its long beak touching a dark, stylised flower on the right. The flower has layered, flame-like petals and long thin trailing stamens, and small ink specks drift between the two. The shapes are flat black with no grey shading, set against a plain light grey background with the subject centred.

Blackwork Botanical Hummingbird Bird Flower Silhouette Ink splatter Stamen

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, and mind the draught from the north door, it has been blowing through Carrow Junction since before the line was laid. You want the story of the bird? Everyone wants the bird. Nobody wants the flower, and the flower is the reason for it all.

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That summer the coal dust lay so thick on platform four that Ada Pryce, who swept it every morning for thirty-one years, said nothing would grow there but grief. Then one Tuesday a black bloom came up through the gap by the water tank, its petals stacked like the frills on a Sunday hat, with long threads hanging off it like the ribs of a wet umbrella. Nobody watered it. Nobody planted it. Little specks of ink drifted off it on the wind and settled on the timetables, so the guard swore the board kept misprinting the times.

The bird arrived in the back of a fish van from the Liverpool docks, no bigger than a thimble, green once, I'm told, though by the time it reached us it had gone the colour of the soot on the lamps. It hung in the air over that flower like a clock that couldn't settle on the hour. Every evening, after the last stopping train had pulled out towards Hexley, it came down and pushed its long beak into the black throat of the bloom and drank. The guard counted. Forty-one evenings, he said, and never once did the bird stop to rest.

On the forty-second night the lamps failed one by one along the platform, and Ada came out with her broom and found the flower lit from inside, a small dark light no one could explain. The bird was still there, wings a blur, and when it lifted away it left one speck hanging in the air. Ada caught it on her finger and kept it in her apron pocket until the day she died. Ask at the ticket office if you don't believe me. They still have the speck.