Black and grey realism tattoo of a hummingbird in flight on the inner wrist and forearm.

Hummingbird in flight on a wrist

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A hummingbird with a long slender beak and outstretched wings is tattooed on the inner wrist, angled towards the hand. The feathers and body are built up with fine shading and soft grey tones, with darker accents along the tail and wingtip. The bird sits against plain pale skin on a woven brown mat background.

Realism Forearm Hummingbird Bird Wing Feather Beak

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm had kept the bell at the high house for thirty winters, and in all that time the bell had never once rung out of turn. So when the little grey bird came up the goat path on the first warm morning of March, hanging in the air before the infirmary door as if on a thread, the novices took it for an omen and ran for the abbot.

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The bird would not be caught. It hovered at the height of a man's shoulder, its long dark beak pointed at the bell tower, and every time Anselm reached for it, it rose a hand's width and waited. Its wings beat so fast they blurred into grey, then stopped, then beat again. The abbot said it was a message. Brother Anselm said it was hungry. They were both right, as it turned out, because a spoonful of sugar-water brought it down to rest on the sill, and tied to its leg with a thread of wool was a strip of paper from the valley church, three days late.

The paper said the bridge at Harrowmere had washed away and the travelling sisters were stranded on the far bank with a cart of medicine. It asked that the bell be rung at each hour until the water dropped, so the sisters would know the way across.

Anselm rang it for nine days. On the ninth the water fell, the sisters came up the path with their cart and their lamps, and the bird was gone, though nobody saw it leave. The novices still say it returns each March to test the bell rope with its beak, and that the rope has never once been found unfrayed.