Black and grey fine line tattoo of a hovering hummingbird with dotted shading on the inner upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hummingbird on an upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A hummingbird in mid-flight with its wings raised and a long, thin beak, shown in side profile. The linework is fine and clean, with stippled dot shading on the body, wings and tail to suggest soft texture. The image is in black ink only, and the bird is placed centrally on the inner upper arm against a pale, plain background.

Fine line Dotwork Upper arm Hummingbird Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

They say the bird came over the pithead the morning after the roof fell at Harrow Dene, when the ropes were still wet and nobody had slept. It was no bird anyone in the village had seen before. It was small enough to sit in a man's cupped hands, its beak as long as a darning needle, and it hung in the air above the winding wheel as though someone had pinned it there.

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Old Ada Pryce, who kept the lamp room, said it went down the shaft ahead of the rescue party and came back up each time they stopped to shore the timbers. Each time it hovered over the same patch of wall, beating so fast the air hummed. The men dug where it hovered. Ada said nobody argued with it, because nobody argued with anything that could stay so still in that much wind.

On the third day they broke through to a pocket of air under a fall of stone, where eleven men sat in the dark with their lamps out to save the oil. Tom Bellamy said he heard the bird before he saw it, a thin whirr like a spinning top, and then a light like a match struck close to his face. He swore its wings were grey with coal dust, as if it had flown into every dark corner of the mine to find them.

The pit was closed in the spring and the bird was never seen again. Ada kept a clean sill in the lamp room window all the same, and dusted it every morning. Each spring she found a single grey feather lying on it, too light to have fallen from anything that had ever lived under the hill.