Black and grey linework design of a hummingbird in flight, its wings breaking into scattered dots and triangular shards, on a plain white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hummingbird in flight design

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A hummingbird with its wings spread in flight, facing right with a long thin beak. The bird is drawn in fine black linework and solid black accents, and its wings and tail break apart into scattered dots and small triangular fragments. The design sits centrally on a plain white background with no skin or body part visible.

Dotwork Geometric Hummingbird Bird Wing Feather Dot Triangle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell,

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You will think I have lost my wits, but the hummingbird came back to the quay again this morning, the same one or another like it, I cannot say. Mr Pargeter swears it is the one that came in on the tide-wrack in March, though no hummingbird has any business this far north. It hung over the bait boxes with its wings going so fast they were only a blur, then turned and went out past the breakwater, and where its wings had been there were little black pieces drifting down, like cut paper, like the triangles we used to fold for the Whitsun boats.

Pargeter's boy ran after them with a jam jar. He caught three, he says, and they were gone by the time he got home, dissolved to nothing on the windowsill. I did not laugh at him. I have been keeping the one I found myself, caught in the wool of my good coat, a little black triangle no bigger than a fingernail. It has not dissolved. It sits in the bottom of the tin where Dad kept his tacks, and I take it out when the nets come in heavy and I cannot remember what the day was for.

I think the bird is going somewhere it cannot yet get to, and it is shedding itself on the way. That is the sort of thought Mam would have had over the kettle, and I suspect you will tell me it is nonsense. Tell me anyway. Write back, even if it is only to say the trains are running.

Yours, with salt in my hair, Ada