Watercolour-style fine line tattoo of a hummingbird in flight with a thin line to a small coloured anchor, on the lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hummingbird and anchor on a leg

Fine line · Calf · Colour · Photo

A hummingbird hovers in flight with a thin black outline, its beak trailing a fine line down to a small anchor in brown and blue. The bird is filled with soft yellow, orange, green and pink washes that bleed past the outline, giving a loose watercolour effect. The bird sits upper right and the anchor lower left over a wash of pink and orange on the skin.

Fine line Calf Hummingbird Bird Anchor Line Wash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hummingbird had been at the fuchsia all week, and by Thursday Nell had given up calling it a wren. It came at seven, when the pink of the sky leaned over the cliff, and it hung there with its beak in the bell-shaped flowers as though it were reading something written small. Tom's anchor still lay in the border where he had dropped it the spring before the boat went, rust gone soft as bread crust, and the bird kept circling it like a question.

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On Friday she found the fishing line. It was the green nylon from the shed hook, the length Tom never got round to cutting, and it was snagged on the bird's beak, one end wound about its head and the other trailing down to the iron. She sat on the step with her tea going cold and watched it try to fly off, dragging the anchor a foot across the gravel, then give up and hover there, bright as a struck match.

She could have cut it. The scissors were on the windowsill. Instead she went to the shed and brought out the paint tins Tom had bought her for their fortieth, which she had never once opened, and she mixed the yellow and the orange and the green, and dabbed them onto the back wall of the house where the render had gone the colour of old teeth.

By dusk the bird had wandered off along the wall, and the thread lay slack in the grass. Nell tied the loose end to the fuchsia stake and left the anchor where it was. In the morning the line was gone, the flowers were drunk dry, and on the pink wash by the back door there was a small smear of blue where something had landed to rest.