Colourful watercolour-style hummingbird tattoo in pink, blue, purple and orange on the side of a person's ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour hummingbird on the side of the ribs

Ribs · Colour · Photo

A hummingbird in mid-flight is shown with outstretched wings and a long thin beak. The wings and body are built from soft, blended washes of blue, purple, pink and orange, with loose black linework and ink splatters at the wing tips and beneath the bird. The bird sits centrally on pale, lightly reddened skin, and the image is a close, well-lit crop of the torso.

Ribs Hummingbird Bird Wing Splatter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The summer the herring failed, Mairi Kinnaird's father sent her up the cliff path with a basket of cold oatcakes and a warning not to speak to the bird that lived in the foxglove. Everyone in Skerrow knew about the bird. It was no bigger than a thumb and it hung in the air like a held breath, its wings going so fast they blurred into smoke, blue at the edges and purple at the heart.

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She went anyway, because the oatcakes were for her grandmother and the path was the only way. At the top the bird was waiting on the stone wall, its throat catching the light like a coin turned over. It did not speak. It only flew down the slope ahead of her, stopping each time she caught up, until she understood she was meant to follow it to the sea-pool below the Hooded Rock.

In the pool the water was the colour of a bruise going yellow, and the bird dipped its needle beak into it and came up shaking orange drops that spattered the rocks. Where they landed, the grey stone bloomed pink and then red, like a cloth dropped in dye. Mairi understood, too late, that the fleet had not been taken by the sea. It had been taken by the colour that had drained out of the water when the bird stopped drinking from it.

She knelt and scooped the pool into her cupped hands, and the bird flew into them, warm as a heartbeat, and left a streak of violet across her palm. The boats came home that autumn heavy with silver, and Skerrow painted its doors every colour it could find.