Two matching black hummingbird tattoos with heart-shaped bodies sit on the inner wrists of two people, shown side by side.

Matching hummingbird wrist tattoos

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two near-identical black hummingbird tattoos sit on the inner wrists of two arms, each bird in flight with its beak pointing down and a heart shape forming its body. The linework is bold and smooth, with tapered strokes for the wings and tail, and the tattoos are filled in solid black with no shading. The arms are photographed against weathered grey wooden boards, with the tattoos centred in the frame.

Forearm Hummingbird Heart Bird Wing Matching pair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, and mind the peat smoke. You want the story of the two birds that came over the water in the year the boats stopped coming to Inish Mor. Nobody on this island had ever seen a bird that small hang in the air as if it were tied there with a thread. The Kelleher girl found the first one caught in the nets drying on the wall, its beak bent the way a needle bends when you press too hard.

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She called her sister Nuala, and between them they freed it with butter on their fingers and a great many prayers the priest would not have approved. The bird lived three days on sugared water from a teaspoon. When it was fit to fly it sat on the rail of the pier and looked out west, toward the place where the sky goes the colour of a bruise, and it did not look at them once. Then the second one came from nowhere anyone could say, hovered over the first, and the two of them went off together like a stitch pulled through cloth.

The girls argued for a week about which of them the birds belonged to. Nuala said the heart in their bodies was proof enough. Kelleher said a heart is only a shape a sailor draws on the side of a stout barrel. In the end they made a pact on the slipway, each holding out a wrist, and the mark they wanted was the one the birds had left in the wet sand, a small bird with its head bowed, carrying its own heart like a lamp.

And that's the thing, now. Every spring the pair come back to the rail, and the sisters are long gone to Boston and Glasgow, but the birds still wait there. Watch for them when the light goes flat. Go on, mind your cup. I'm nearly done.