Small realistic colour hummingbird tattoo in green, blue and pink on a forearm, shown beside a US quarter for scale.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small colour hummingbird tattoo beside a quarter

Realism · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A small hummingbird in flight is tattooed on skin, with its wings spread, long beak pointing up and right, and tail fanned out. The bird is shaded with soft blending in green, blue, purple and pink, with dark outlines defining the feathers. A US quarter sits to the right of the tattoo, giving a sense of its very small size against a plain, light background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom,

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The hummingbird came back to the Bramley row on Tuesday, the morning after the wasps got into the packing shed. I watched it from the ladder with a fistful of Discovery apples, hanging in the air a foot from the lilac as if somebody had pinned it there. Mum says they only come north in a poor summer, chasing sugar, and I said this one clearly has no sense of direction.

You will laugh, but I measured it. Aunt Ruth's quarter from Ohio was in my apron pocket, the one she posted the year you left, and I held it up against the bird the way Dad used to check the size of a trout. The coin was just wider than the bird's whole body. Its wings were a green so bright they looked wet, fading to blue at the throat and then to a pink-purple that made Mr Okafor, on the next ladder, say it looked like a bruise trying to become a sunset. I told him he needed to get out more.

By Friday the orchard was loud with the pickers' radio and talk of the first frost. I climbed down at noon and the bird had gone, and I found I did not mind as much as I expected.

It was gone by the time I got down, but the windowsill still smells of crushed windfalls. I have left a saucer of sugar water out every evening since, just in case it has forgotten the way.

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