Pencil drawing of a hummingbird in flight beside a cluster of flowers and leaves arranged in a heart shape, shown as a tattoo design on white.

Hummingbird and flowers forming a heart

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

A hummingbird with a long slender beak hovers to the right, its wings raised, facing a cluster of trumpet-shaped flowers and leaves on the left. The flowers and branch curve around to form the outline of a heart, with the stem tapering down to a point at the bottom. The drawing uses soft graphite shading with fine hatching on the feathers and petals, set against a plain white background.

Realism Botanical Hummingbird Flower Heart Leaves Branch 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

Sit still, and don't stare at the guard, he has enough to worry about without a child studying his moustache. Yes, I'll tell it. It passes the time better than this queue does, and nobody here has heard it, which is the best kind of story.

Keep reading

Before they strung the wire along the river, there was a woman called Teodora who sold trumpet vine cuttings from a barrow on the old bridge. Her husband had crossed to the far bank to work the orchards. Every dawn a hummingbird came to her red flowers, a green thing no bigger than a thumb, and she tied a folded paper to its leg with red thread. The guards searched carts and coats and boots, but nobody thought to search a bird.

The bird flew the length of the river, past the wire and the barking dogs, and hung in front of his kitchen window the way it hung over her flowers, beak pointed straight at the glass. He read her news, wrote his answer in pencil on the back of a ferry receipt, and sent it home the same way. Four winters they did this, and the bird never once landed on the wire.

Then one morning the officers asked why a bird kept circling the customs house. A young guard knelt, untangled the thread, and read Teodora's last line aloud: come back by the flowers. He opened his hand and let it go. That is why the vine curls round into a heart, and why the bird is always the one looking in. Right, he's waving us forward now. Pick up that basket, and keep your hands where he can see them.