Black and grey dotwork line drawing of a hummingbird in flight, with a clock face and floral detail on its head and wing.

Hummingbird with clock dial design

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A hummingbird in mid-flight is drawn in black ink against a white background, with its long beak extended and wings spread. Its head and body are filled with fine dotwork and botanical-style patterns, and two clock faces and small spirals sit over the chest and belly. The shading is stippled and the linework is precise, with no colour used.

Dotwork Botanical Hummingbird Bird Clock Gear Flower Spiral Wing

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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

Sit down, the lot of you, before the soup goes cold. Shut that window, mind, the wind off the bay gets into the clocks. Mr Ashdown always says the hall clock is the only honest thing on the premises, and he's right, because it runs four minutes slow and never once pretends otherwise.

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Back before the war there was a clockmaker on Marine Parade called Edwin Pell. He had a daughter, Ida, who could not keep still. She'd climb the pier rail, pick the lace off the parlour chairs, and hum at the gulls until they answered her. So her father made her a bird out of brass and watch-jewels, something she'd have to sit still for. It was a hummingbird with a beak like a darning needle, and he set two little dials in its breast so it would always know the hour and the hour before that.

The trouble was the bird would not stop. Every time Ida wound it, it shot up past the gas lamps and out over the groynes, hovering where the tide turned and looking back at the town as if it were checking the time on everybody. Pell swore it would only hold still at slack water. So on the evening of the big storm, Ida carried it down the sea steps, held her breath, and waited for the water to go flat.

It went flat. The bird hung there with its wings a blur, and the whole bay stopped rolling for the length of one tick. Ida said afterwards she could have walked straight across to the lighthouse. Then the church struck eight, the sea remembered itself, and the bird was gone. Her father never mended the hall clock after that, which is why it runs slow. Somebody has to keep a bit of the bay for her. Now, who's having the last of the custard?