Black line drawing of an infinity symbol with a spiral on the left and a small bird with a swept wing on the right, shown as a tattoo design on a plain white background.

Infinity symbol with a hummingbird

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A single continuous black line forms an infinity symbol, with a tight spiral curling inside the left loop. On the right, the line ends in a stylised bird with a fanned, swirling wing and a long curved tail feather. The drawing uses tapered strokes of varying thickness on a plain white background, with no shading or colour.

Fine line Infinity Bird Hummingbird Spiral Wing Swirl Line art

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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

You are three weeks into the job at the Kessel Brook crossing when the bird first comes in through the open hatch of the booth. It is the colour of wet slate and no bigger than your thumb, and it hangs over the rubber stamp tray as if it has been sent to inspect your work. You tell it, in the flat voice you have been practising, that the crossing is closed to birds. It does not care. It darts out again, loops round the barrier arm, and returns to the same spot above the ink.

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The lorries come through in a line that never seems to shorten. The same grey lorry brings the same crates of pears, the same driver with a cigarette he never lights, and every time he hands you his papers he says the road was shorter when his father drove it. You stamp, you wave him on, and somewhere past the rise the road bends back and he is in front of you again, waiting, as if the whole country were a circle drawn with one unbroken line. You stop asking which way he came from.

On the fourth Thursday you find a scrap of paper folded into your pen tin. It is a map drawn in pencil: a figure of eight, one loop pinned with a spiral that marks this booth, the other loop labelled in handwriting you do not know. Beside the spiral someone has written a single word, Stay, and beside the crossing someone has sketched a bird with a feather trailing behind it like a question mark.

The bird is back at dusk. You open the hatch wider, and it flies out through the gap and along the road in a figure eight, and you realise that the line it draws is the only way through, and that you have been waiting at the wrong end of it.