This painting was born from two moments.

My colleague recently rescued an injured hedgehog, and weeks later learned that the little one had healed and was released back into the wild, marked with a blue line along the spine. To me, it felt like blue flowers of kindness blooming across a fragile life.

Around the same time, my mother was tending to her aging hedgehog. As his body grew frail, she cared for him as she would any bedridden human—cleaning, feeding, gently turning him—until he slipped quietly into memory.

Two hands, two stories—yet one fact: suffering is not only human. To recognize it is not luxury, nor elitism, nor a way to trivialize human suffering; it is simply compassion.