Black ink line drawing of a hummingbird in flight, with wings and body filled with geometric patterns of scales, stripes, checks and spirals.

Hummingbird in flight with patterned wings

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A hummingbird hovers with its wings spread and its long, thin beak pointing to the right. The wings and body are filled with fine ink linework, using scale-like rows, stripes, checkerboard blocks and square spirals, while the head and beak have smooth outlines. The drawing is in black ink on a plain white background, with no colour and a balanced, centred composition.

Geometric Hummingbird Bird Wing Feather Beak Pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bird came in through the gap above the sluice room door just after three, which was the hour Gwen had learned to expect strange things. It hung in the corridor light between the linen trolley and the drip stand, wings going so fast they blurred into lace, and did not seem to notice the fire door sighing shut behind it.

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Nobody else was awake. Mr Achebe in bay two was snoring through his nasal cannula, and the agency HCA had gone to find blankets for the family room. Gwen tore the lid from a sharps box, folded the cardboard into a shallow tray and walked slowly, the way her mother had walked towards a cat on a windowsill. The hummingbird let her come within a hand's width. Its beak, long as a cannula and twice as thin, pointed at the ceiling tiles as if it were reading a pattern there.

She had spent twelve years counting things: millilitres, breaths, the seconds between a monitor's bleeps. It had never occurred to her that a bird might count too. The feathers along its wings were stacked in scales and stripes, squares turning inward like the route of a corridor she could walk blindfold, and she found herself tracing them with her eyes, one row, then the next, as though the pattern were a chart she could read to the end.

At the far end of the corridor the stairwell window was open a crack, the way Sister Doyle always left it for the smokers. Gwen tipped the tray towards the gap. The bird hovered a moment longer, looked back at her with a black bead of an eye, and was gone into the dark before the fire door sighed again behind her.