Black tribal-style hummingbird tattoo with a small red heart on the upper back.

Tribal hummingbird with a red heart on the back

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A hummingbird in flight faces left, with a long thin beak, a wing swept upwards and a tail of curling feather-like swirls. The bird is outlined in solid black linework with dotted and scrolled detail inside the body, and a small red heart sits in the chest area. The photograph is taken close up on warm-toned skin against a plain background.

Back Hummingbird Bird Heart Swirl Feather Tribal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are up the ladder in the Pennock orchard at the end of August, picking the last Conference pears, when a bird no bigger than your thumb stops in the air beside your ear. It has come a long way off course. Its beak is a thin black needle aimed at the windfalls, and its wing lifts above it like a fan of dark leaves. You hold very still. Nobody has told you what to do with a visitor like this.

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Old Mrs Pennock, who owned these trees before the landlord sold them, kept a red glass heart hanging from the cider shed. She said hummingbirds followed colour the way bees followed nectar, and that a heart hung in the right place would keep one near. You laughed at that when you were twelve. Now the bird circles the shed three times, then settles on the rim of the pulp bucket, folds its curling tail beneath it and drinks.

You do not move until it has finished. It lifts off with a sound like tearing silk and heads straight over the hedge towards the reservoir, where nothing grows that anybody planted. When you climb down, the hem of your coat is soaked with dew, and the shed door has swung open on its own hinge.

You take the red glass heart down, wipe the dust from it with your sleeve, and hang it again a little lower, where a bird with a long beak could reach it without stretching.