Fine-line tattoo of a hummingbird with a soft watercolour wash in orange, pink, yellow and green, with a small blue and brown anchor hanging from a thin string on the calf.

Watercolour hummingbird and anchor on a calf

Fine line · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A hummingbird in flight is drawn with thin black outline, with a loose watercolour wash of orange, yellow, pink and green filling its body and wings. A fine black string runs down from its beak to a small anchor at the lower part of the composition, which is shaded in blue and brown. The soft pink and orange washes spread across the skin behind the bird and anchor, giving the piece an airy, painted look.

Fine line Forearm Hummingbird Bird Anchor String

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tomasz,

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The little bird came in the post this morning, wrapped in a seed catalogue, and I nearly put it on the fire with the bills. Your father would have laughed at me for that. It was the hummingbird from your last letter, the one that hovered at the chandlery window in Ramsgate until the old man gave it a length of black thread to chew on. You wrote that it was fine, that it drank from the honeysuckle along the customs hut fence and rode the wind off the breakwater. I believed you until I read the bit about the anchor.

You tied the thread to the anchor from Grandfather's boat, the one that has been sitting in the shed since the spring. You said it was so the bird would not get lost crossing the water. I know you meant well, but a thing held down by an anchor is not going anywhere it wants to go. I walked down to the shed on Tuesday and looked at it for a long while, the rust flaking onto my good shoes, and I thought about how he used to say that a boat without a mooring is only a rumour on the sea.

So here is what I am asking. Let the bird go in the morning, while the tide is making. Keep the anchor, if you must, as a paperweight for your bills. And if the bird comes back to the window in the evening, tie the thread loose, love, the way you would tie a ribbon round a parcel you mean to send.

Your mother