Colourful hummingbird feeding from pink speckled lilies, a tattoo on a person's upper back near the shoulder blade.

Hummingbird and lilies on a shoulder blade

Traditional · Back · Colour · Photo

A hummingbird in mixed green, blue, purple and yellow tones hovers at left, beak pointing toward a cluster of pink stargazer-style lilies with dark speckles and green leaves. The hummingbird is outlined in black with soft shading, while the flowers use pink shading and fine dark spotting. The design sits across the upper back with the bird and flowers balanced diagonally.

Traditional Back Hummingbird Lily Flower Leaves Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down by the range, love, and mind the cat, she's been sulking since the Whitsun lodgers left. Mrs Pargeter had the back bedroom then, the one with the bad sash, and she swore on her mother's Bible that a bird no bigger than a thimble came tapping on the glass the week the fog rolled in off the harbour. Green as a bottle end it was, and blue at the throat, and it hung there in the grey as if it had paid good money for the view.

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Now everyone in Saltcombe knew whose garden the lilies belonged to. Old Arthur Venn planted them the spring his boat went down past the breakwater, one bulb at a time, the big speckled stargazers his wife loved because they smelt like a church on a wet Sunday. He never came back to pick them, and she never came to the house again, so they grew wild along the wall, pink and freckled, dusting every sill in the terrace with their pollen.

Mrs Pargeter opened the sash, against her better judgement, and the little bird went past her ear like a dart and into the bloom at the bottom of the garden, beak down the throat of the nearest flower as if it had an appointment. She said it stayed there till the fog lifted, drinking, and the lily leaned down to meet it, and not one petal bruised.

Next morning the window was shut again and the bird was gone, but there was yellow dust on the sill in the shape of two small wings. Arthur's widow, eighty-one and not one for fancies, came round with a jug of milk and asked whether it had been and gone. I have never known which of them she meant.