Side-by-side photos of a surgical scar on the abdomen, and the same area covered by a colour tattoo of a hummingbird and pink lotus flowers.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hummingbird and lotus cover-up on abdomen

Botanical · Other · Colour · Photo

The left panel shows a long vertical surgical scar on a bare abdomen, with visible suture marks and raised healing lines around the navel. The right panel shows the same area covered by a colour tattoo of a blue and orange hummingbird in flight above pink lotus flowers, with green leaves and soft wash-like shading. The composition is a before and after pair, with the tattoo sitting over the scar and partly around the navel.

Botanical Other Hummingbird Bird Lotus Flower Leaves Scar Abdomen

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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 closer, the lamps on Mill Row are going out one by one, and this story needs the last of them. You want to know about the pond behind the tea-house, the one the council filled in the year the trams stopped. Before they filled it there were lotus in it, pink as a boiled sweet, and a grey wall that kept the rain off the fish.

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Old Venn Okonedo kept that water garden for Mrs Tallis, who paid him in tea leaves and a room above the boilers. Every morning he cut the dead heads and talked to the carp. One August a hummingbird came over the wall from the railway cutting, no bigger than a thumbnail, with a blue back like a struck match and a throat the colour of a fox. It hung over the flowers and would not leave.

Venn sat on the wall with his flask that week and watched the bird drink from the lotus cups. He thought about his brother, who had gone south with the railway and never sent word. Tell me, he said to the bird, what is a thing like you doing this far north. The bird said nothing, being a bird, but it came back the next night, and the next.

When the lorries finally came, Venn stood between the machines and the water with a cut lotus in each hand. The foreman sighed and fetched his supervisor. By the time they returned the pond was half drained and Venn had gone home. Come spring, a single pink bloom pushed up through the new tarmac behind the tea-house, and the hummingbird was sitting on the nearest bollard, waiting for it to open.