Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hummingbird in flight on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A hummingbird with outstretched wings hovers beside a long, slender beak, with its head and throat shaded in iridescent green and magenta. The feathers are rendered with soft gradients and fine detail, and the wings fade into grey and teal. An orange wash behind the bird adds warmth and separates it from the skin.

Realism Forearm Hummingbird Bird Wing Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ysolde,

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The bird came through the open shutter of the lamp-house on the third morning of the Veldmoor fog, and it hung in the air above my workbench as if it had been sent to inspect the glass. Nobody in the kingdom keeps hummingbirds. The Chancellor's gardeners swear the last one died in the orangery under King Aldric's grandfather, yet there it was, throat flaring green, then a magenta so deep it looked wet, then green again as it turned its head towards me.

I named it Quill because its beak was longer than my smallest tuning fork and it refused to be anything else. For a week it fed from the jar of cochineal syrup I kept for the stained panes. The Harbourmaster's boy swore that its wings left a grey-blue dust on the cobbles that the rain would not shift, and half the town came to the quay to stare at the bird's ledger of comings and goings, which was really just the sun on the water.

On the eleventh morning the shutter stood open again and the room was full of orange light, but the bird was gone. In its place lay one grey feather, pinned to my order book with a bead of wax, its tip still tinted teal where the morning had caught it.

I have set the feather in the window frame, where it turns green at noon and rose at dusk. If the carriers reach you before the wall-bells, come home. I am leaving the shutter open.