Colour tattoo of an anchor with a rope and two pink hummingbirds over blue watercolour splashes, on a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Anchor and hummingbirds on a upper back

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A grey anchor with a wooden crossbar and a coiled rope sits centrally, with two pink hummingbirds flying either side of it. Soft blue watercolour splashes sit behind the design, and the anchor is shaded with grey tones. The tattoo is photographed from behind on the upper back, with the anchor's ring near the shoulder blade.

Back Anchor Rope Hummingbird Bird Watercolour splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hummingbird had been riding the rigging since Falmouth, and by the time we raised the Azores the cook had decided it was a bad omen. He wanted it off the ship. Nobody in the forecastle said so aloud, but every man had watched the little thing hang in the wind like a dropped coin, and every man had started counting the days since the last decent catch.

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Ada Prowse, the cook's niece and the only one of us who could read the chart without moving her lips, found it asleep in the crook of the bowsprit one grey morning. She held out her palm and it stepped onto her knuckle without a flutter. Its throat was the colour of boiled sweets, and it looked at the sea as if it had paid for a berth and didn't think much of the cabin.

Three nights later the anchor fouled on a shelf of reef off the islands. The cable ran hard as a fiddle string, the windlass groaned, and the cook stood at the rail with a hatchet, shouting that we'd lose the iron and be done with the bird together. Ada stood between him and the cable. She didn't argue. She just stayed there with her arms out while the hummingbird rose from the bowsprit, circled the anchor ring twice, and dropped down to the shackle as if it had business there.

At first light the tide lifted us clear and we hauled the anchor up streaming weed and rust. The bird was gone. In its place, where the ring met the chain, a fleck of blue paint had come off the bulwark and hung in the spray like a small cloud. The cook never swung the hatchet again. He used to say the anchor holds the ship, and the bird only holds the anchor, and that was more than most of us managed in a bad season.