Watercolour-style tattoo of a hummingbird in flight above a pink flower, across the inner forearm and wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hummingbird and flower on a wrist

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A hummingbird hovers above a pink, petalled flower with a green stem, both spanning the wrist and lower forearm. The linework is soft and loose, with the bird and flower built from washes of colour and splashes of ink that bleed beyond the outlines. Greens, purples, pinks, oranges and yellows dominate, set against plain pale skin and a grey background.

Forearm Hummingbird Flower Bird Petal Stem Splatter

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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 hummingbird came north in a tin box packed with tea dust, its feathers still holding the green of a Jamaican morning, and Harriet Kell had until the Thursday post to make it hover. Her master at the Bristol workshop wanted a likeness for the merchant's wife, something exact enough to hang beside the parrots. Harriet tried. She pencilled the wings in fine strokes, mixed the throat from carmine and indigo, and every time she laid a line the wash bled past it, pooling into the paper's grain like spilt ink on a tablecloth.

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By the third night she had spoiled four sheets and the lamp oil was low. The docks were quiet except for a ship's bell somewhere down the river, ringing the hour a little late. Harriet stopped fighting the colour. She let the purple run out of the throat and into the air, flicked orange across the wing where the bird ought to be most still, and dragged a pale pink bloom up from the bottom of the page, petals splayed like a fan. Its green stem she drew in a single sweep, and where the brush lifted, the paint broke into drops.

On Thursday the agent came for the box. He held the sheet up to the window, frowned at the smudged edges, then looked again and said the thing looked as if it might leave the page. Harriet said that was rather the point. When he had gone she found a single green barb caught in the wet pink of the flower, and she left it there, because the bird had not stayed still for her and she did not mean to ask it to now.