Colourful geometric hummingbird tattoo on the lower leg, with pink, teal and orange panels, black linework and triangle and diamond motifs above and below.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric hummingbird on a calf

Geometric · Calf · Colour · Photo

A hummingbird in flight with one wing spread, its long beak pointing up and to the right, is filled with angular teal, green, blue and yellow panels. A pink and purple wing, black tail feathers and small stacked triangles and diamonds frame the bird, with a diamond chain trailing down below it. Bold black outlines define the shapes, and the colour is applied in flat blocks, with the composition running vertically along the calf.

Geometric Calf Hummingbird Bird Geometric pattern Triangle Diamond Feather Wing

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, you'll not hear the end of it standing by the dodgems. This is the tale of the glazier's bird, and I'll tell it the way my nan told it to me, over a paraffin stove in a caravan that smelled of wet dog.

Keep reading

In the winter the fair stopped at Wisbech, and a glazier named Tobias Crane kept a workshop on the wharf full of offcuts. Every pane he cut was a shape nobody would buy: little stacked steeples of red and amber, diamonds with sharp teeth, triangles that pointed at nothing. One January a hummingbird came in through a broken casement. It was no bigger than a thimble, and it hung in the cold air with its beak aimed at the rafters like a compass needle that had lost its north.

It wanted colour. It sipped the teal from one pane and the blue from another, and wherever it drank, the glass went dull and grey. Tobias didn't shout. He set down his solder, held up the sea-green offcut, and made a bargain: take what you need, but leave me one gold diamond for every feather you borrow. The bird agreed, being a bird with a head for figures, and flew out with a chain of diamonds trailing from its tail like a lantern string.

They say the diamonds still turn up at the fair when the dusk comes down, threaded on the wire of the big wheel. Hold one in your palm and you'll see a wing open in the glass of the lights. Mind your fingers, though. That bird always comes back for its change.