Fine line drawing of a hummingbird in flight with a long beak and outstretched wings, shaded in a rainbow gradient of colour lines.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rainbow line-art hummingbird in flight

Fine line · Colour · Flash

A hummingbird in flight is drawn in continuous flowing lines, with its long bill pointing left and its wings spread out to the right. The feathers are built from many thin strokes that thicken and taper, with a small solid black eye and a shaded throat. Each part of the bird is coloured in a gradient of red, orange, green, blue and purple on a plain pale background.

Fine line Hummingbird Bird Wing Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tomasz,

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The hire car died outside Calvary Wells at half past four, and I'm writing this on the back of a petrol receipt because the diner's pens have all been chewed. You'll laugh, but what kept me sane while the mechanic fetched his brother was a hummingbird. Not a real one, or not at first. It was painted on the window of a shuttered gift shop, the paint gone soft and rainbow in the sun: red at the bill, green down the back, blue where the wings should be. Someone had drawn it in one unbroken line, so thin it looked like it might lift off the glass if you breathed on it.

Mr Okafor from the garage, who is seventy and talks like a radio left on in another room, says the artist was his cousin's boyfriend, passing through in 1998 and paid in petrol and a bed. He never came back. The bird stayed. Every spring, he says, the dust storms take a little more colour off the left wing, and every spring somebody in town fetches a tin of paint and touches it up, though nobody agrees who.

The car is fixed. I have a spare tyre I don't trust and a bottle of water that tastes of the pipes. Before I left I walked out to the shop window, and the sun swung round the corner just as I got there, and the whole bird went orange for a second, the colour of the road. I took a photo. It's terrible. You'll have to see it in person.

Love, Nell