Hummingbird and flower on upper back
Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo
A hummingbird in mid-flight drinks from a yellow flower, with its wings and body rendered in blue, purple, pink and green. Loose black linework and splashes of colour give a watercolour-like finish, with soft blue washes behind the bird. The composition runs diagonally across the upper back, and a thin green stem trails down from the flower.
Find an artist for thisTake 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 wind had been out of the south for nine days when the bird came in over the water, too small to be a gull and too tired to be anything else. Hetty Pell saw it first from the gallery, a smear of green and blue dropping towards the sea, and she called down to her husband that something was falling that had no business being out there.
Keep reading
Tom Pell climbed up with a cup of sugared water, because his mother had always said that was what the sick needed, and he set it on the rail. The bird would not touch the cup. It hung in the air before the one yellow iris that grew in a cracked pot beside the lamp housing, and it drank from the flower instead, its long beak working in the bloom while its wings blurred out a fan of pink and violet that the spray off the rocks could not quite wash away.
After that it came back every evening at the turn of the light, and the keepers learned to move the pot where the wind could not take it. Tom painted the flower's shadow on the whitewash so he would remember where it had been. Years later the boy went to sea, and the iris dried to brown paper in its pot, but the bird kept coming, a little less blue each summer, and hung at the rail looking for the green stem it had been fed from. Hetty said it was only the sea's way of carrying bright things home.
More like this
From the plentytattoo archive, uploaded by a user. Is this your work? Ask for credit or removal.