Three black hummingbird silhouettes with rainbow-coloured wings tattooed on the upper arm, in a flying formation.

Three hummingbirds on an upper arm

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

Three hummingbirds in flight are tattooed in a diagonal line across the inner arm. Each bird is a solid black silhouette, with smooth fills and no visible outlines. Their wings fade into soft colour in red, orange, yellow, purple, blue and green, giving a rainbow effect against the skin.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The night the gasworks went dark, three hummingbirds came down Carrick Street with their wings still burning from the sunset. Old Mrs Pell swore they were the same birds that had flown off with the colour from the bridge lamps in her mother's time, and she said it plainly, the way she said everything, while she shelled peas on the front step.

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They had grown bored, she said, of a city that wore only grey. So they went to the tram depot where the wires hummed and the painters kept their tins, and they dipped their beaks in the red of the pillar boxes, the orange of the chip shop sign and the yellow of the taxi roofs. By morning the tins were empty and the pillar boxes stood pale as bread.

The night watchman, a man called Eddie Rusk, climbed the depot roof with a torch to shoo them off, and found only three black birds perched on the gutter, sulking. Their wings were unlit, dark as coal. He told them, 'You can't keep the colour, it isn't yours.' The smallest one looked at him for a long time, then lifted off and dropped a single green spark onto his cap.

Eddie wore that spark to the end of his days, and the pillar boxes never did go fully red again. Mrs Pell said that was the price, and the birds had come off best, since they still carry the sunset from one end of the city to the other, flickering over the rooftops when everyone else has gone to bed.

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