Coloured pencil drawing of a stylised green hummingbird in flight, with a red and yellow fading tail and water droplets on its wings, suitable as tattoo flash.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Green hummingbird with water droplets

Colour · Flash

A stylised hummingbird in mid-flight is shown against a plain white background, with a long curved beak and wings built from layered green feathers. Water droplets sit on the wings and tail, and the tail fades from yellow to deep magenta at the tips. The image is rendered in coloured pencil with soft blended shading and fine directional strokes on the feathers.

Hummingbird Wing Feather Water droplet Beak Tail

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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

The gale had stripped the lantern room glass clean of salt for the first time in a week, and Ada found the bird on the brass rail at first light, its wings still going though it sat perfectly still. It was no bigger than her thumb. Its beak curved like a question someone had bent to fit the wind. She had only ever seen hummingbirds in her mother's old atlas, and none of them had been this green, green as the water under the cliffs before a squall.

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"Don't you dare," her uncle said from the stairwell, meaning the bird or the coffee he was carrying, she was never sure which. He was the keeper, and the keeper kept the logbook, and the logbook had no column for creatures that arrived on the back of a storm. Ada filled a saucer from the rainwater cistern and set it beside the rail. The bird ignored it. Instead it dipped its head to the drops clinging along the iron edge, one after another, as if reading them.

By noon it had drunk every bead off the gallery glass and started on the lens housing, its tail feathers trailing over the sill, yellow at the root and fading to a red so deep the tips looked wine-stained. Uncle Tobias swore it was a stowaway from some cargo ship. Ada decided it had flown straight out of the weather, carrying the storm's last water on its wings the way a clerk carries receipts.

When the sun finally broke through, the bird lifted, hovered over the saucer, and left the rainwater untouched. Ada watched it shrink into the blue until only the lamp's reflection was left, turning slowly across the sea. That evening, in the logbook, she wrote *clear by noon* under weather, and under visitors, *green, and not ours to keep*.