Loose sketched design of a hummingbird in flight with a long beak and swept tail, drawn in black ink with teal and blue accents on a white background.

Sketch of a hummingbird in flight

Mixed · Flash

A hummingbird hovers with its wings raised and its long, thin beak extended to the right. The linework is loose and scratchy, with tapering strokes, broken lines and small flicks of ink that suggest movement and feathering. Black ink dominates the design, with teal and blue strokes added along the wings, body and tail against a plain white background.

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bird is in bay four when you come on at eleven, hanging above the sluice sink like something somebody forgot to pin down. Nobody has opened a window on that corridor since spring. Staff nurse Harrow says it came in with the linen trolley, and by midnight half the ward has stopped what it was doing to watch it dart from the drip stand to the curtain rail and back again, its beak held out straight as a pen.

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You take a sheet of paper from the station and a plastic beaker, and try to coax it down the way your gran taught you to catch a moth. It ignores the beaker. It ignores the paper. It stops, beats its wings so fast they blur into two grey-green smudges, and looks at you with one black bead of an eye before returning to the sink. Mr Okafor in bed six, who has not spoken since teatime, lifts a hand off the blanket and points at the window above the taps, which you hadn't noticed was ajar.

Around two the ward goes quiet in the way that makes you listen for alarms. You sit on the step stool with your back against the cold radiator and wait. The bird drifts to the sill, lifts, drifts again, and at last finds the gap at the top of the frame and is gone into a sky the colour of wet slate.

You write the time in the handover book: 02:14, window open, one visitor left. Then you cross out visitor and write bird.

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