Illustration of a hummingbird in flight, trailing teal and purple paint splashes on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hummingbird in flight with paint splash

Colour · Flash

A hummingbird is shown mid-flight, facing right with its long thin beak extended. The bird is rendered with soft, painterly shading and blended tones rather than defined outlines. Bursts of teal, blue and violet splatter spread behind it across a plain white background.

Hummingbird Bird Splash Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The night sister on Ward Six kept a jar of old paintbrushes in the sluice room, left behind by a man who had come to decorate the children's wing and never finished. Nobody threw them out. That was the March the bird came in through the high window above bed nine, while Mr Tamsin slept and the monitors counted for him in their small green numbers.

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Sister Oonagh Price saw it first as a smear of light, then as a bird, hanging in the air a hand's width from the curtain. Its beak was long and thin as a darning needle. Where it beat its wings, colour came off it in spatters, teal and violet, and the colour ran down the blue curtain and spotted the lino like spilt rinse water. She did not shout. Her gran had always said you do not frighten a thing that has come a long way. She fetched sugar from the tea trolley, stirred it into a plastic cup lid, and set it on the locker. The bird drank, and the tremble went out of its wings.

Her gran had also said that such birds were sent to take the grey out of a sickroom, one bright thing at a time, and that they never stayed to be thanked. It went out the way it came, past the drip stand and the sleeping man, and the splashes it left stayed on the ceiling tiles, the colour of a sea in a painting nobody had finished. The cleaners scrubbed at the curtain all the next week and it would not come clean.

In the morning Mr Tamsin woke, looked up at the ceiling, and asked for a pencil. Oonagh went to the sluice room for the jar. Among the old brushes she found one violet feather, dry and perfect, and she left it where it lay, because it did not seem hers to take.