Woman with hummingbirds and mandala design

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink drawing of a woman's face in profile, framed by two hummingbirds, a large mandala and a compass rose. Feathers, beaded chains and arrow shapes hang below, and the left side is built from stippled dots that fade into a lattice pattern. The work is entirely in black and white, with fine linework in the face and feathers and dense dotwork shading in the background.

Dotwork Geometric Woman Hummingbird Mandala Feather Compass rose Arrow Bead Peacock feather

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hummingbird came aboard at Scrabster in a crate of ice, tucked among the boxes of haddock like a stowaway from some warmer sea. Nobody on the Marigold could say how it had crossed the Pentland Firth, and Davy Rennie swore it had been perched on the coil of warp since midnight, watching us bait the lines as if it were judging the work.

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My father kept the brass compass in the wheelhouse, and it was the only thing he ever let me polish. The bird took to the glass, ticking its wings above the card and settling on the rim whenever the needle wandered. Within a week the crew had stopped calling it the stowaway and started calling it the pilot.

In October the fog came down over the Stroma banks so thick I could not see the bow. The radio hissed, the depth sounder gave nonsense, and I stood at the wheel with the cold climbing through my boots, certain we would drift onto the rocks. Then the hummingbird lifted off the glass and hung in the grey a yard ahead of the bow, and I followed it for an hour by the hum of its wings.

When the fog lifted at Scrabster, the bird was gone and the needle swung steady to north. Davy says it flew home to the warm side of the world. My father would have said it had only been doing the work of a brass card, pointing true. I keep the glass clean anyway.