Colour tattoo of a green and purple hummingbird beside pink trumpet flowers and black swirling vine linework, on skin in a neo-traditional botanical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hummingbird and pink flowers on upper back

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

A hummingbird in flight with green body, red throat and purple-blue wings hovers beside two pink trumpet flowers on green stems. Black tapered linework forms curling vines and a spiral that flow across the composition beneath the bird. The bird uses soft gradient shading while the flowers and leaves are filled with solid, saturated colour on a light skin background.

Botanical Neo-trad Back Hummingbird Bird Flower Leaves Vine Swirl Spiral

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

Sit down, the lot of you, and mind the pram. No, Kayleigh, the bird did not come for your crisps. Right. Fourteenth floor of Ashgrove House, the summer the council painted the stairwells the colour of weak tea, a green thing came hanging off the rail of Mrs Okonedo's balcony as if it had been posted up in a parcel. Nobody had a word for it. Her grandson said it was a fly with ambitions. The man from number nine said it was a bee that had been to the gym.

Keep reading

Mrs Okonedo kept trumpet flowers in a row of old coffee tins, pink ones, because the tins were free and the flowers were stubborn. Every morning the bird went from tin to tin, whirring, stopping dead in the air as if someone had pressed pause, then pushing its long beak down into each bloom. It only ever took a little. It never stayed long. She said it was the only thing on the whole estate that knew what time it was for.

Then came the August the lift broke for six weeks and the flowers went brown in the heat. The bird came every morning anyway, to the empty tins, and hung there with its wings going like a hand waving someone off. Mrs Okonedo, who had not climbed fourteen floors in a year, climbed them with a watering can. She did not say why. She filled the tins and sat on the step beside them, the way you sit with someone waiting for a bus that is not coming.

The flowers came back by September. So did the bird, and it brought a friend, which was the first sign the tins were a good address. Now go on, eat your crisps.