Three black hummingbird silhouettes with soft pink, purple and teal wing shading, tattooed on the inner upper arm.

Three hummingbirds in flight on upper arm

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

Three hummingbirds in flight are tattooed in a row along the inner upper arm, each drawn as a solid dark silhouette. The wings carry soft gradient colour in pink, orange, purple and teal that fades into the skin. The arm is photographed close up against a white top, with the birds arranged diagonally across the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dev had been told the birds were pigeons, then his nan said they were sparrows, and by the time the lift doors opened on the fourteenth floor of Calder Point he had decided they were neither. Three of them hung above the bins at the end of the walkway, wings blurring so fast the air around them seemed to shiver. They looked like wet slate until they turned, and then a flash of pink or teal caught the light like the inside of a sweet wrapper.

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"They're from the florist's," said Mrs Okafor from number 1407, leaning on her broom as though she had been expecting trouble all week. "A van went over on the ring road Tuesday. Crates of something foreign. Sanjay at the newsagent says the RSPB are coming Monday." She sniffed. "They won't last. Nothing that small survives a Leeds winter."

Dev did not believe her. He filled a yoghurt pot with sugar water from the kitchen tap, the way a library book had said they drank, and carried it out to the railing. For an hour nothing happened. Then one bird dropped out of the grey like a stone that had remembered it was a bird, hovered an inch from the rim, and drank. The other two followed, and the three of them stayed, humming at him, while the wind shoved the block's sodden washing sideways.

On Monday a van came and took them away in a towel-lined box. Dev kept the yoghurt pot on the sill for a week, filling it every morning. On the Saturday, when he pulled back the curtain, a single purple flicker was hanging in the air beside it. He stood very still in his socks and let it drink.

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