Colour tattoo of a green hummingbird feeding from pink blossoms, with blue and green paint-splash effects, on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hummingbird and blossom on the ribs

Ribs · Colour · Photo

A hummingbird hovers to feed from two pink blossoms with green foliage on the right. The bird is shaded in greens, with a red throat patch, and the wings and tail dissolve into dark splatter strokes. Loose blue, teal and green splashes and drips surround the design across the skin, giving a painterly, unframed composition.

Ribs Hummingbird Blossom Flower Leaves Bird

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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 bird came aboard at Brentford in a crate of coffee sacks, and by the time we were through Hanwell lock it was hanging over the tiller as if it had paid the toll itself. Dad says it's a sign. I've told him signs are for people with time to stand about, and we have none of that on a working boat, but I'll admit it's hard to argue with something that size that won't sit still long enough to be argued with.

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Dear Tom, you'll want to know it eats. It won't touch the sugar water Dad left out in the saucer, only the nectar from the cherry blossom at Bull's Bridge, which he has been hooking down with the boathook every morning so it can reach the pink ones. The petals drop onto the roof and the bird stays put, its wings going so fast they blur into the spray off the lock gates. Its throat is a red so bright it looks painted on by someone in a hurry, and I suppose someone was.

On Thursday the wind dropped and the cut went flat and silver. I came up at six and the bird was gone. There was only a smear of teal paint on the cabin side where I'd been slapping it on the night before, and a line of dark drips that had flown off the brush and landed along the gunwale, as though the bird had left in a hurry and dropped its tail feathers on the way. I've left them there. Come up at Easter. Bring new oars, Dad's are rotten, and bring the good paint.