Colour neo-traditional tattoo of a hummingbird and red and purple lilies across the ribs of a person's side.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hummingbird and lilies on the ribs

Neo-trad · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A hummingbird hovers beside red and purple lily blooms with green leaves and stems, with blue and purple shading behind the flowers. The bird and flowers use smooth, defined outlines with soft gradients in the feathers and petals. The design wraps diagonally across the side of the torso, and the photograph is cropped below the chest and above the hips.

Neo-trad Botanical Ribs Hummingbird Lily Flower Leaves Bird Petal Stem

Find an artist for this

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

In the hill kingdom of Orrendell, the queen's gardener Mab Tallow kept one bed of lilies behind the east wall, red as a fox's pelt and purple as a bruise going off. The queen had sworn those flowers would bloom as long as the crown stayed on her head, so Mab watered them from a copper can every dawn and never once picked a stem.

Keep reading

The summer the rains failed, a hummingbird came over the wall no bigger than Mab's thumb, its throat lit like a coal. It hung above the lilies each morning, dipping its long beak into the trumpets, and Mab stood with her can in her hands and said nothing. The wells in the lower town went green. The almanac-keeper announced that the springs had dried beyond the high pass, and that whoever found water there would have the crown's gratitude and its gold.

Mab climbed the pass with a clay jar tied to her belt and the bird going ahead, stopping when it stopped, waiting on the rocks when she slipped. Past the last scree it turned in the air and dropped into a crack in the stone where a thread of water shone. She knelt and drank from her cupped hands, filled her jar, and the bird rose to hover at her shoulder as if it had only ever been showing her the way.

She carried the water down, the queen took it, and the crown was kept. When the queen offered her any reward in the kingdom, Mab asked only that the lily bed be left alone and the hummingbird never driven off. The queen agreed. Each morning after that, the servants said, the small bird still came over the east wall, and the lilies bent down to meet it, and nobody in Orrendell ever picked them.