Colour tattoo of a pink blossom branch with a hummingbird and three butterflies on the side of a thigh.

Pink blossom branch with hummingbird and butterflies

Botanical · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A branch of pink blossoms climbs up the side of the leg, with a partly coloured hummingbird feeding beside it and three butterflies placed around the branch. The blossoms are shaded in rose pink with soft highlights, while the hummingbird is drawn in outline with light colour fills and the butterflies use purple, teal and green. The composition runs vertically along the limb, with a grey-outlined butterfly at the top edge of the frame.

Botanical Thigh Blossom Branch Hummingbird Butterfly

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hummingbird had been feeding on the cherry tree behind the chapel for nine days before I thought to write it in the log. Ellen Pender had already named it. She said it came only when the wind was from the south, and that it had blown in from the Azores with a crate of onions, which I didn't believe, though I didn't say so. I just kept the sugar water fresh in a jam jar lid and tied it to the lowest branch with garden wire.

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The blossom came early that year. Pink as boiled sweets, the petals so thin the light went through them, and every morning the butterflies arrived to lean on the branch like drunk sailors: a purple one with white-tipped wings, a green and teal one nobody could name, and a pale one that looked grey until the sun caught it. Ellen wanted to pin them for the school. I wanted to leave them be. We argued about it on the sea wall with our flasks of tea going cold.

On the tenth morning the bird was not on the branch. It was on the wire, hanging from my jar lid, its throat working like a pulse. I stood very still with the kettle in my hand. Ellen came up the path with her cardigan buttoned wrong and stopped beside me, and neither of us spoke, because we both knew it had decided to stay, and that nobody on this island had any say in the matter.

We left the jar full and went down to the harbour for the afternoon boat. When we came back the lid was dry, the petals had begun to drop, and the hummingbird was gone. Ellen said that was the wind. I think she was relieved. I filled the jar again anyway, and I still do, every morning, in case it finds its way back from wherever it went.