Realistic drawing of a green and blue hummingbird with trailing wisps of colour, above a black and grey bird in a swirling dark form, shown as a tattoo design on a white background.

Hummingbird with ink smoke and a black bird

Realism · Mixed · Flash

A hummingbird in mostly green, blue and purple tones hovers to the left, with a long orange beak and wispy tendrils of colour trailing from its wings and body. Below and to the right, a black and grey bird with finely shaded feathers sits within a swirling mass of dark ink that spills into fine branching strands. The shading is detailed and soft on the birds, with bold solid black and fine linework in the tendrils, set against a plain white background.

Realism Hummingbird Bird Feather Tendril Swirl Beak

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The apples were splitting on the branches by the last week of August, and Mother Ashby said the orchard would not wait on anyone's sulking. So Ada Harrow climbed the old Bramley with a sack on her hip and her jaw set, and that was how she came to hear the blackbird weeping in the lower boughs.

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It was not a blackbird any more, not really. In June the village scrivener had dropped a pot of ink at the ford, and the bird had bathed in it before anyone could stop him. The black had gone into every feather and stayed there. He had no song left, only a dry clicking in his throat, and the ink had spilled out of him in long curling threads that caught on the bark and on the wire of the fence.

Ada asked him what he wanted. He said he wanted his colour back, the green of his neck and the grey of his breast, and that it had all gone up the orchard to a small hummingbird who came each evening to drink from the late roses. Ada waited until it came down, bright as a struck match, its beak long and orange as a coal. She held out the last windfall, split and sweet. While it fed she took hold of one trailing thread of its violet and drew it gently loose, the way her mother taught her to unpick a seam.

The hummingbird did not notice until dusk, and by then the thread was wound round the blackbird's wing, green as new leaves. Neither of them gave it back. The hummingbird flew off with a little less shine and a good deal more sense about windfalls, and the blackbird sang that night for the first time since June, a rough song with a green note hidden in it that Ada heard from the kitchen door and never mentioned to anyone.