Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hummingbird in flight

Realism · Mixed · Photo

A hummingbird hovers with its wings raised and a long thin beak extended to the left. The bird is shaded in smooth gradients, with green iridescence on the head and body, a red patch on the throat and dark grey-black wings with fine feather detail. The bird sits against a plain, reddish skin background, with soft lighting and no other design elements visible.

Realism Hummingbird Bird Wing Beak Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hummingbird came back to the Verdant Ring on the third morning of the cull, which Mother Hesketh called a sign and Dr Anand called a sugar leak in bay nine. I didn't care which. I had been up since four with a torque driver and a seized coolant pump, and the little thing hung in front of my visor as if it had paid for the view.

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Nobody had seen a living bird since the Ring cleared Earth orbit. The manifests listed the species as lost before the first hab was welded, and the seed vault had nothing but a single pressed feather in a glass case, labelled in a hand nobody could read any more. Yet there it was, wings a grey blur, its throat flashing red each time it turned toward the trumpet vines we'd coaxed up the spine of bay nine. The green on its back looked wet, as though the light had been poured onto it and hadn't finished running off.

I should have logged it. Protocol said anything living and unclassified went to quarantine, and quarantine on this ship meant a sealed bulkhead and a long talk with the council. Instead I unscrewed the spare nectar bulb from my belt, dabbed sugar water onto a sprig of vine, and stepped back. The bird came in close, tongue flicking, its long beak nearly brushing my glove. It didn't look at me once.

When the pump was fixed I filed the work order as a seal failure. In the remarks box, under my name, I wrote: fed one. Then I went back to bay nine every morning with a fresh bulb, and every morning the red at its throat caught the lamps and held them a moment longer than seemed reasonable.