Colour tattoo of a hummingbird in flight with a swirling tail, shaded in red, orange and yellow with teal edging, on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hummingbird with swirling tail

Colour · Photo

A hummingbird in mid-flight, with a long beak, outstretched wing and a tail that curls into two spirals at the lower left. The linework is fine and dark, with soft gradients of red, orange and yellow across the wing and body. Teal shadowing along one side of the outlines adds depth against the skin, and the design sits on its own with plenty of open space around it.

Hummingbird Bird Swirl Scroll Wing Tail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bird came to the well every morning that the frost held, and Hanne Mollwood, who kept the goats at the forest's edge, began to think it had come for her. It was no bigger than a thimble, red as a coal the wind had blown on, with a beak as thin as a bramble thorn. Nobody in Cold Harrow had seen its like. The old men said it was a stray from the south, blown up over the sea with the storms.

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She tried to catch it in her apron in the third week. It slipped through her fingers and went up into the alders, and when she followed it into the wood, the path she knew bent away from her like a dog leaving a hearth. The trees thinned into a clearing where the ground was bright with gold leaves that did not fall. In the middle, a tail of fire, all spirals, had caught on a stump and was curling there, and the bird hung before it, humming.

'You are the one who lets the goats eat the hedge,' it said, in a voice like a needle drawn through cloth. 'I have a bargain for you. Carry this tail back to the well and tie it to the bucket chain, and every hard winter you will have warm water.' Hanne asked what it wanted in return. It only tipped its head and said the forest wanted nothing, and that was the trouble with forests.

She carried the spirals home in her shawl. They were warm as bread. Each winter after, the well kept steaming when the others froze, and the bird came to drink at dawn with its wings stilled. She never saw the tail again, though she tied a red ribbon round the chain on the day the thaw came, so she would remember who had kept her in water.