Colourful watercolour-style hummingbird tattoo in blue, purple, pink and yellow on the left side of a person's ribs, with a black top visible above.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour hummingbird on the ribs

Ribs · Colour · Photo

A hummingbird in mid-flight faces right, with outstretched wings shaded in blue and lilac and a long beak. Soft, loose linework and washed colour fade into splashes and drips of pink, yellow and blue at the tail and below the wings. The bird sits diagonally across the ribcage against a plain background of skin and a black garment.

Ribs Hummingbird Bird Feather Splatter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hummingbird came through the window of the Lindqvist Dye Works on the last Tuesday in October, and nobody could agree afterwards whether it had been blue or lilac or the colour of the wet pavement after rain. Marguerite was up a ladder rehanging the skeins when it hit the glass, and she watched a streak of colour bounce off the sill and vanish into the vats. By the time she climbed down, the big copper pot had gone the palest shade of violet, and the whole room smelt of cloves and rain.

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Her grandfather had always said that the dye works kept a little of every colour it had ever made, and that the trick was to ask nicely. So she stood at the mouth of the yellow vat with a spoon in one hand and a jam jar in the other, and she asked. Nothing happened for a long while except the slow tick of the cooling pipes. Then a thread of pink lifted off the surface like breath on a cold morning, bent itself into a beak, and went out through the open door towards the harbour.

She followed it down Quay Street with her apron still on, past the chandler's and the shuttered bakery, through the spray of the high tide that was spitting drops of yellow and blue onto the cobbles. At the end of the breakwater the thread hung in the air, trembling, and became a bird again, wings blurred, drinking from nothing. It turned its head to look at her with one bright eye.

Marguerite took the lid off the jam jar and held it out. The hummingbird considered this for a moment, then folded itself small and dropped inside, weighing no more than a pinch of pigment. She screwed the lid down and walked home, and the colours inside the glass went on shifting all the way up the hill.