Colour tattoo of a hummingbird and pink cherry blossom branches with falling petals, sitting on the upper back over the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hummingbird and cherry blossom on a shoulder blade

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

A hummingbird in blue and grey feeds from a pink cherry blossom branch, with several open five-petalled flowers and falling petals around it. The flowers and bird are shaded with soft gradients that give a realistic, three-dimensional look against the skin. The tattoo is coloured, with pink and blue dominating, and it curves diagonally across the upper back.

Botanical Realism Back Hummingbird Cherry blossom Flower Branch Petal Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hummingbird came through the window of Ward Nine at ten past three, the same minute the north lift jammed between floors for the third time that week. I was on nights as a porter, which mostly meant shifting empty beds from one corner of the building to another and pretending I knew where the soiled linen went. Mrs Okafor in bay C saw it first. She pressed her call bell so hard the corridor light blinked out.

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The vase on her locker held blossom her son had cut from a tree in Otley, and the bird went straight for it. It hung beside the flowers, tail fanned, dipping its beak into the open pink cups one after another. Sister Brannigan came round the curtain with a syringe in one hand and stopped dead. A petal came loose and drifted past the drip stand, then another, slow as snow.

Walter in bay B, who had spent forty years on the railway and never once been impressed by anything, said the bird wasn't lost. He said they never strayed far from the flowers they loved, and it would want a way out. So I wheeled him to the fire exit at the end of the corridor, took the bar in both hands and pushed. The cold came in smelling of wet tarmac. The hummingbird hesitated on the sill, then shot over the car park and up past the sodium lamps until I couldn't tell it from the dark.

I kept one petal back from the mopping up. Next morning it was stuck to the handle of my trolley, pressed flat and faintly pink, and I have carried it in my wallet ever since, behind my bus pass, where it has gone the colour of weak tea. Walter died in March. Someone on the ward still keeps a jam jar of cherry blossom on the sill of bay B.