A four-year-old girl needs her finger amputated after her grandmother wrapped a plaster so tightly around it she cut off the circulation.

The entire tip of four-year-old Wen Wen’s third finger turned black and died, and she is due to have an operation to have the dead flesh removed in a fortnight.

Wen Wen was playing at her home in Suzhou City in east China’s Jiangsu Province when she bit the nail on the middle finger of her left hand and caused a sore.

Wen Wen, four, is set to have her finger amputated after her grandmother wrapped a plaster around it so tightly it cut off the circulation and turned black

Her 60-year-old grandmother, who has not been identified, put a plaster on it, the Yangtse Evening Post reports.

Worried the plaster would fall off, she wrapped a piece of cloth around it extra tightly.

But two days later she unwrapped the cloth and took off the plaster and Wen Wen’s finger had swollen and turned black.

The grandmother rushed Wen Wen to a clinic, where staff said the muscles in the finger were dead, but the bone was OK.

‘Later, we didn’t feel right, so we sent her here to the hospital to take a look,’ she told Yangste Evening Post journalists.

Doctors in Yuexi hospital, in the Wu Zhong district in Suzhou, examined the finger and discovered the blood vessels had been so badly damaged the only way to stop the dead tissue from spreading was to cut the finger off.

It is likely Wen Wen, pictured here with her grandmother, will lose five per cent of the function of her left hand, meaning she won’t be able to carry out tasks like typing

Chief surgeon Deng Wei said his team will wait a few days to see if the wound had become infected, and then decide again whether amputation is the best course of action.

It is likely she will lose five per cent of the function of her left hand, he said, meaning she won’t be able to carry out tasks like typing.

He has treated patients with similar issues before. Usually, the problem is not with the plaster, but how it is applied, he said.