Grey shaded hummingbird with pink bleeding heart flowers and sketchy black linework on a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hummingbird and bleeding hearts on upper back

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A hummingbird in greyscale shading hovers beside three pink bleeding heart flowers hanging from thin stems. Loose, sketchy black linework forms a broken circle and a leaf behind the bird, and pink splashes spread across the design. The tattoo sits across the upper back and shoulder blade, with the bird as the main focal point.

Botanical Realism Back Hummingbird Flower Heart Circle Leaf Splash

Find an artist for this

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

Before the bells, Ottilie Hark lit the ovens in the dark of Sallow Lane and found the shutter already open. A hummingbird sat on the sill, no bigger than her thumb, its throat flickering like a struck match. Her grandmother had said such birds were the souls of people who loved too much and fell asleep in the wrong order. Ottilie kept that to herself. She set down a saucer of honey water and went back to her dough.

Keep reading

Every morning it came. She grew bleeding hearts in a clay pot by the back step, because her husband Tobias had planted them the spring before he sailed for the Dogger Bank and never came home. Their pink lanterns hung from thin stems like coins on string. The bird went to them first, then to the saucer, then to the spun-sugar roses she left cooling on the sill. It took what it wanted and never once asked for bread.

In November the frost came early, and for three mornings the sill was empty. On the fourth she found the bird in the yard, wings folded, caught in a loop of old fishing line that had blown off the wall. She worked it free with flour on her fingers, held it in her palm until it stirred, and carried it inside to the warmth of the proving cupboard. It drank from the saucer, then from the tip of her finger, which she had not expected.

When the light turned grey, she opened the shutter. The bird lifted, circled the pot once, and settled on the stem of the nearest heart. Ottilie took a fresh loaf from the rack, cut a ring from its middle and set it on the sill, cracked sugar catching the dawn. Tobias used to say she could never leave a thing unfinished. She left the bird its bread ring and went down to open the shop.