Black linework flash drawing of a hummingbird in flight, its wings and body built from swirling curls and flourishes on a white background.

Swirling hummingbird design in flight

Black and grey · Flash

A hummingbird in side view, with its long beak extended to the right and wings spread upward. The body and wings are filled with dense, flowing black curls, tapered strokes and spirals that vary in thickness. The drawing is in solid black on a plain white background with no shading or colour.

Hummingbird Bird Swirl Flourish Spiral Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down by the range, love, and mind the kettle, because this is a story for after the shift whistle, and you'll not hear it twice. My grandfather told it to me the way his did to him, in the back kitchen with the lamp turned low. It was the winter of the big fall at Tallow Drift, when the men were three hundred feet under and the air had gone thick and sweet with damp.

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Dai Pritchard was hewing at the face when a thing came out of the dark past his lamp. Small as a thumb it was, and it hung in the air the way a bee hangs over clover, then shot off down the roadway and hung again. The men swore it was a hummingbird, though nobody in the valley had ever seen one, and Dai's wife said it was a moth with ideas. It turned in loops and curls, and the black dust spun off its wings like coal catching a draught, and wherever the trail curled, the air moved.

Dai followed it. Past the hewing, where the men had said the roof was sound, the bird stopped at a seam of wet stone and hovered there, beak pointed at the crack, wings blurring. Dai put his palm flat on the rock and felt the breath coming through it. He called the others back. By the time the timbermen had shored the gallery, the old roof had come down where they'd been standing, and not one of them was hurt.

The bird was gone by morning. They say it went up the shaft on a draught, curling like smoke, and the spirals it left on the washhouse wall stayed there for years after the whitewash. Every spring the bracken on the spoil heap uncurls in just that way, and my grandfather always said you'd know a hummingbird's tail if you looked at a fiddlehead long enough. So when the bracken starts to unfurl, go and look. Mind your feet on the scree.