Colour realism style tattoo of a hummingbird in flight in pink, purple, blue and orange on the upper arm, with black outlines on the tail feathers.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hummingbird in flight on an arm

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A hummingbird with a long beak and outstretched wings is shown in mid-flight, with its tail feathers fanned out at the lower left. The bird is rendered with soft painterly shading, fine highlights on the wings and black outlining on the tail feathers. Pink, purple, blue and orange ink dominate the design against a plain skin background and white fabric.

Realism Upper arm Hummingbird Bird Wing Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, and mind the sparks, because I will only tell this once before the wind turns. Dessa Norr kept the glasshouse on the drowned side of Harrow Quay, where the sea came in through the old car park and never left. Her job was to walk the pipes at dawn and count the things still breathing. Most mornings the count was moss and rats. Then one hot wet morning there was a flick of blue above the dead rosemary, a long needle of a beak, and the whole small creature hung in the air as if someone had pinned it there.

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It was the colour of a storm settling on its back, a blue that ran into violet, and its wings had orange at the tips where the light caught them, like the last of a sunset somebody had forgotten to put away. Its throat flashed pink whenever it turned. Dessa had seen pictures of birds in the ruined schoolbooks, but the pictures were dull beside this. It moved faster than her eye could follow, then stopped dead in front of her face and looked at her, as though it were the one doing the counting.

The Quay council wanted it caught for the seed bank. Tobiah Lusk, the foreman who ate his bread with a knife, said a bird that small would fetch three months of rations from the mainland traders. Dessa said nothing. That night she left the glasshouse door open, set a dish of sugared water on the sill, and sat with a lamp until the oil ran dry.

In the morning the dish was empty and the door still open. The bird was gone east over the water, a sliver of colour the sun caught once and then let go. Lusk called her a fool. I call her the only one of us who ever made a thing fly away on purpose. Now pass me that bread, and mind the knife. It was Lusk's, and he never did get it back.