Loose ink sketch of a hummingbird in mid-flight with black and teal linework on a pale grey background, drawn as a possible tattoo design.

Hummingbird sketch in black and teal ink

Mixed · Flash

A hummingbird hovers with its wings raised and a long, thin beak extended to the right, drawn with loose, sketchy black linework. Teal and blue-green strokes run along the wings, tail and body, with small ink splatters and fine hatching adding movement. The bird sits centrally on a plain grey background with open space around it.

Hummingbird Bird Feather Wing Sketch

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bird arrives on the third day of the calm, when the sails hang like wet washing and the pitch softens between the deck planks. You are sent aloft with a cup of sugared water because the bosun says a thing that small will be dead by supper, and you find it already hanging in the rigging, wings a grey blur, beak thrust past the mainyard as if it means to spear the horizon. It does not land. It simply stays, a hook of green fire in the still air.

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Nobody aboard knows where it came from. The mate says Jamaica, the cook says a crate of cacao, and the purser swears it hitched a ride from Trinidad among the limes. You do not care which. You hold the cup out at arm's length and it comes to you, tongue flicking, then darts off to the captain's cabin and hovers above the chart table, where the ink is still wet on the day's reckoning.

For four days it feeds from your fingers and sleeps wedged in a coil of hemp. You stop counting the miles and start counting its visits. On the fifth morning a breeze comes up from the south-west, the halyards sing, and the bird is gone before the watch changes. You find only a teal feather stuck to the logbook, and beside the entry for the seventeenth of March a spatter of black ink where it must have shaken itself dry.

That evening the lookout calls land, a grey smudge off the larboard bow. You fold the page over the feather and say nothing to anyone about how close the thing had come to Jamaica after all.