Two colourful hummingbird tattoos, one on the side of the ribs and one on the inner forearm near the wrist, drawn with loose sketched lines and soft pink, teal and orange washes.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two hummingbirds on ribs and inner forearm

Ribs · Colour · Photo

Two hummingbirds in flight are shown, one on the side of the torso above the hip and one on the inner forearm near the wrist. The birds are drawn with thin, sketchy black outlines and soft, bleeding washes of pink, teal and orange that fade at the edges. The two tattoos sit at different angles across the frame, with the forearm piece in the lower right and a hand held open at the left.

Ribs Forearm Hummingbird Bird Wing Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The birds came the week Mr Aske's paint cart went over in the ford below Cold Hollow, and nobody in Thornleigh thought much of it until the colours started drifting up the lane. Pink first, then a teal like river ice, then a smear of orange that never quite dried. My mother said it was the dye works upstream. I said nothing, because I had seen the two of them hovering over the mill pond at dusk, wings blurred, long beaks dipping into the foxgloves as if they were testing the shade.

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Aske had been a painter before he was a carter, and he lodged with us that winter with a box of watercolours he never opened. He sat on the stile every evening and tried to copy them. His sketches were all wrong, he said. The birds would not hold still long enough to be true. Each page he tore out bled through where he had dragged a wet brush, so the wings ran off into the sky like something unfinished.

In March he went up Cold Hollow with the last cake of rose madder and did not come down. We searched the wood for three days. On the fourth I found his easel at the edge of the clearing, and beside it the two birds, perched on a bare branch, not moving at all while I walked past them. When I looked back from the lane, they had lifted off together, and the air where they had been was faintly pink.

I still keep his torn sketches in the dresser drawer. None of them are right. Every spring, when the foxgloves open along the hollow, I carry a jar of water up to the stile and wait. I have learned that the only way they come to you is if you are still enough to be forgotten, and I never once try to hold them.