Black dotwork tattoo of a geometric, origami-style hummingbird with the script words elegiremos volar beneath it, on a forearm.

Origami-style hummingbird on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A hummingbird is drawn as angular folded planes, with its wings and body shaded in stippled dots and outlined in thin black lines. Cursive Spanish script reading elegiremos volar sits beneath the bird, curving under its tail. The ink is black only, and the close crop shows the skin of the forearm around the design.

Geometric Dotwork Lettering Forearm Hummingbird Bird Origami Script text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The greenhouse glass had gone milky with a summer of dust, and my grandmother would not let anyone wash it. The seedlings liked the dimness, she said, and so did the hummingbird that came in through the broken vent every afternoon at four, hanging over the lobelia as if someone had pinned it to the air. Nobody had told it that hummingbirds do not belong in a Kent garden, and Abuela Pilar saw no reason to tell it.

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She had brought a square of paper from Madrid, pale green on one side and white on the other, and she taught me to fold it on the potting bench while the kettle ticked on the gas ring. Valley fold, mountain fold, and never crease the wing you need to lift, she said, tapping my knuckles with the bone folder. The bird we made had sharp planes that caught the light like cut glass. Beneath it, she had written on the back of the packet in careful blue biro: elegiremos volar.

I asked her why it did not say we will fly. She shrugged and said flying was simply what birds did, while choosing was what made the flight belong to them. I thought that was the kind of thing old people said to end arguments, and I told her so. She laughed until she had to sit down on the upturned bucket.

The next afternoon I pinned my own bird inside the vent, its folds still a little crooked, and waited. The real hummingbird came in at four, circled once, and settled on the paper beak as though it had been invited. Then it tested the air, found it wanting, and went back out through the gap in the glass the way it had come.