Pencil sketch design of a hummingbird feeding from bell-shaped flowers on a curling vine with leaves, suited to a botanical tattoo.

Hummingbird feeding from bell flowers

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A hummingbird hovers to the right, its long beak reaching into a bell-shaped flower on a vine that curls around the left side of the composition. Further bell flowers hang from the vine, with small leaves and tendrils near the top and bottom. The drawing uses soft graphite pencil with fine hatching on the wings and tail and light shading on the body, in black and grey only.

Botanical Fine line Hummingbird Bird Flower Vine Leaves Tendril Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bellflowers on the north wall had gone over by the second week of August, all but the ones trained high under the gutter, and that was where Ruth Pardoe found the bird. She had come up the ladder with a pair of secateurs and a grievance about aphids, and she stopped with one foot on the rung when she saw it hanging in the air, perfectly still, as if someone had pinned it to the afternoon.

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Its beak was no thicker than a bramble thorn, and it slid into the nearest bell as neatly as a key into a lock. The grey-feathered wings blurred into nothing and then came back into focus, and the whole bird seemed to be listening to the flower. Ruth had kept this garden for thirty-one years for the Marsdens, who had gone to Canada and never once written about the roses. She knew every hedge and every broken drain. She did not know where a creature like that had come from or how it had crossed the sea without dying of cold, and she decided, standing there with her heart knocking, that she did not need to know.

She did not move. Her knees ached and the ladder creaked, and still she waited, the way she had once waited at the kitchen window for her husband to come up the lane from the pit. The bird visited four flowers, then a fifth, then turned its head and looked straight at her with an eye like a drop of ink. Then it was gone over the wall toward the glasshouses, and the vine swayed behind it.

The next morning the bell it had fed from was still bent sideways, its lip pressed flat. Ruth left it that way. When the nursery lad asked why she wouldn't tidy the wall, she told him the bird had put in a claim, and it was owed.