Small black and grey realism style hummingbird tattoo in flight on the side of a ribcage, shaded feathers and a long thin beak.

Hummingbird on the ribs

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A small hummingbird in flight is tattooed on the side of the ribs, with its wings spread upward and its long beak pointing left. The bird is rendered in black ink with soft grey shading across the wings, head and body, giving it dimension. The composition is centred on the tattoo against plain skin, with a black top above and a white top below.

Realism Ribs Hummingbird Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell had been watching the fuel barge for an hour when the bird came out of the hold of the Marisol, a green-backed thing no bigger than a thimble, flicking between the crane hooks as if it had been counting them. The dockers said it had flown in on a crate of coffee and would be dead by Thursday. Nell didn't believe them. Things that small had to be tougher than the sea.

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She carried sugar water down to the quay in a jam jar on Monday, and again on Tuesday, and by Wednesday the bird would hover at her shoulder while she ate her pasty on the bollard. Her grandfather, who had mended nets in this harbour for fifty years, said it was a sign of something, though he would not say what. He only sat on the step of the chandlery and watched her with the look he kept for weather coming in from the west.

On Thursday the wind swung round to the south and the Marisol sounded her horn for the tide. Nell stood on the wall with the jar in her hands, empty but for a smear of syrup. The bird rose above the masts, its wings going so fast they blurred, then it hung in the air with its long beak pointed at the open water, as if it had remembered something it had come a very long way to forget.

By dusk the ropes were slack and the gulls had gone quiet on the roof of the net loft. Nell refilled the jar and set it on the wall without a word. Before the lamps came on, the bird came back down out of the dark and drank.