Black ink pen drawing of a hovering hummingbird above a sprig of leaves and open flowers, shown as a tattoo design on white paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hummingbird and blossoms ink drawing

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A hummingbird hovers with its wings spread above a stem of leaves and three open flowers, one resembling a rose and two trumpet-shaped blooms. The linework is fine and precise, with stippling and hatching building the shading on the bird's body, wings and petals. The drawing is entirely black ink on white paper, with two pens placed at the right edge of the frame.

Fine line Botanical Hummingbird Bird Rose Flower Leaves Stem Bloom

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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 rain has been coming sideways off the estuary since six, and by eleven the canvas over the flower stall sags like a wet sail. You sell the last bunch of bindweed to a woman who wants it for a wedding she isn't sure about, and you wrap it in newspaper already gone soft at the corners. Behind you, the crate of cut roses from the Dutch lorry has started to smell of sugar.

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Something knocks against the tin roof above the awning, then again, quick as a pulse. You look up and there is a hummingbird hanging in the grey light over the tap by the fishmonger's, its wings a blur you can only hear. It has come in under the tarpaulin the way the sparrows do, drawn by the trumpet flowers you stood in a jar at the front. Nobody else turns their head. The fishmonger is shouting prices. The rain keeps on.

You know the bird will not stay. Nothing that small stays anywhere in weather like this. So you take the pad of cartridge paper from under the till and the fine black pen you use for price tags, and you draw it while it hovers: the needle of a beak, the flick of the wing, the way it tips toward a bloom and then thinks better of it. Your lines come out fine and quick. By the time you have shaded the second petal, it has gone, a single stroke of grey through the drip.

Closing up at dusk, you find the drawing pinned by one corner to the awning pole. The rain has blurred the ink at its edges, the petals bleeding like watercolour. You leave it there. Someone will take it down in the morning and wonder who drew the bird, and you will not tell them, because the best thing about a thing that doesn't stay is that it leaves you something to keep.