Vibrant watercolour-style tattoo of a hummingbird in flight above purple flowers, placed on the upper arm.

Watercolour hummingbird and flowers on an arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A hummingbird in mid-flight, with its long beak and outstretched wings, sits above two purple flowers with yellow centres and dark dots. The linework is loose and feathered, with soft blended shading and splashes of colour that fade at the edges, giving a painted look. Pink, orange, yellow, blue, green and purple inks dominate, and the design fills the frame against a plain skin background.

Upper arm Hummingbird Bird Flower Splatter Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The paint box had sat on the windowsill of the back bedroom at Gull Rock House since June, and Ada Penrose could not bring herself to tidy it. Cakes of cadmium and rose madder, a cracked tin of ultramarine, brushes gone stiff at the tips. Her lodger, a retired colour chemist named Mr Hallam, had gone out along the tide line each morning with a sketchbook and come back with damp paper that smelt of salt.

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On the Thursday of the storm he did not come down to breakfast. Ada found his door unlatched and the room empty except for a hummingbird, stunned against the glass, its wings a blur of blue and orange as it battered the pane. She eased up the sash. The bird settled on her knuckle a moment, long beak pointing at the purple thrift in the jam jar on the sill, then went off over the slate roofs like a thrown handful of paint.

Hallam's sketchbook lay open on the bed. The last page held a bird in mid-flight, the wash bleeding past the edges, and beneath it in his neat hand: Colour does not stay where you put it. Let it run. Ada read it twice, then carried the ultramarine down to the kitchen and began to mix.

By evening the house smelt of linseed and salt. She painted the sill, the jar of thrift and two flowers in the window box, letting the blues splash beyond the frame the way he would have. When the guests came down for supper they stopped in the hall to look at the wet sheets drying along the banister, and nobody asked where the old man had gone.