Colour tattoo of a blue and green hummingbird with outlined stars and swirls on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hummingbird with stars on upper back

Back · Colour · Photo

A hummingbird in flight, with blue wings, a green head and a pink and orange underside, is shown with a long black beak. Small outlined stars, dots and black swirling linework surround the bird on the left and beneath it. The bird is shaded with soft gradients in colour ink, and the design sits centrally on bare skin against a plain background.

Back Hummingbird Bird Star Swirl Dot Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The van gave up at a quarter past four, a mile short of the Sallow Creek turn-off, and the only thing moving on that grey shimmer of road was a hummingbird. I'd seen them at the pumps in Mercy Wells, never out here, where the wind came off the flats hot enough to warp a map. Nan's tin of sugar water was still in the glovebox. I poured a capful into the lid, set it on the bonnet and sat in the shade of the tailgate.

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It came back every few minutes, blue as a struck match, hovering at the lid with its beak like a long black pin. Between sips it turned and gave me a sharp bright look, then slid off south-west in a skip and a loop, the way the swirls on a page run when the pen goes too fast. Above the ridge the first stars were out, small pale fives scattered as if someone had shaken a salt cellar.

On the third trip I followed it. Twenty minutes over broken rock and dry wash, grit in my boots, until the ground dropped and there was a seep of green under a lip of stone, a pool no wider than a kitchen table, with cottonwoods bent over it as if listening. The bird perched on a twig above the water and did nothing at all, and I understood I'd been led, the way Nan once led me to the good blackberries behind the chapel.

When I walked back at dusk the lid was empty. I filled it from the pool, a full cupful, and carried it across the flats in both hands, and behind me the bird went about its business, drinking what it could find and making for home.