Sheet of hand-drawn bird silhouette designs, each set against a rainbow watercolour wash, with a partial hand visible at the left edge.

Bird silhouettes with rainbow watercolour washes

Colour · Flash

The sheet shows several small dark bird silhouettes with long beaks, some with wings spread and some perched or in flight. Each bird sits on a loose wash of colour, shifting through red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple. The birds are placed at scattered points across the page, with the densest group in the lower right.

Bird Silhouette Rainbow Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hummingbirds came to Marrow Cove the spring the salt works closed, and nobody in the village could say where they had come from. They were small and dark against the grey sea wall, long-billed, and each one trailed a little rag of colour behind it as if it had dipped its wings in a paint pot on the way over. Old Bet Sallow said they were pieces of the sunset that had got loose. The schoolmaster said they were a kind of finch that had been living on the boats. Nobody argued with either of them, because the birds went on hanging in the air over the harbour mouth as though they were waiting for something to finish.

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That summer Ada Penrose, who mended nets for her uncle, found one hovering at the height of her shoulder while she worked. It did not flinch when she raised her hand. It only dipped, then rose, and where it had been, a band of green stayed on the air for a moment before it faded. She did not tell anyone. She began laying out her own colours on the quayside each evening, a thread of madder, a bit of woad, a scrap of marigold dyed cloth, and the birds came down one at a time to sit on the edges of them.

In September the storm came in off the Atlantic and the fishing fleet did not come back. Ada walked the wall at dusk with a lamp. Out past the point the water was black, and then, low over it, a single dark shape turned and turned with a purple wash spreading from its tail. She held the lamp high. The bird folded its wings and came in straight over the waves, and she followed the flash of violet until the boats appeared behind it, one by one, riding into the lee of the harbour.