Colourful watercolour-style hummingbird tattoo with loose splashes of green, blue, pink and purple on the upper back.

Watercolour-style hummingbird on upper back

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A hummingbird in flight is drawn with a dark, fine beak and wing outlines, with the body and wings filled by loose washes of colour. Blues, greens, pinks, purples and yellows bleed outward into splatter-like marks around the bird, giving a painted look. The bird sits centrally in the frame against smooth skin, with the wings extended on either side.

Back Hummingbird Bird Watercolour Splatter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find the bird on the potting bench in June, when the sweet peas have gone over and rain has been coming sideways across the kitchen garden for a week. It is not dead, only stunned, its needle beak caught against the rim of the old tin of watercolours your aunt Maud left on the shelf. Its wings are the blue of a jay's egg, and they keep opening as though it means to leave and has forgotten the trick of it.

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You cup it in both palms. It is warm as a boiled egg and weighs less than the pencil behind your ear. Maud used to say a hummingbird could never be drawn in one clean line, because it never holds still long enough to be outlined, only washed. She painted the glasshouse orchids for thirty years and never once managed a bird. You carry this one down the path past the rhubarb and set it on the rail of the bird bath, where the sugar water is still sweet from yesterday's fill.

It drinks for a long time. Then it lifts without a sound and hangs in the air above your head, so close you can see the dark bead of its eye fixed on you. It turns once, then dives at the shed wall and the whole garden seems to tip. When you go back inside, the tin is open on the bench, every pan wet and the lid lying in the grass. On the whitewashed boards of the shed there are fresh splashes of pink and green and violet, spattered out from the centre like something thrown in a hurry, and below them, a single small dot of black, as neat as a full stop.