Colourful hummingbird tattoo with black-outlined scrolls and swirls on the lower leg, in a neo-traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hummingbird and swirl scrolls on a calf

Neo-trad · Calf · Colour · Photo

A hummingbird in flight is shown in profile, with its wings and tail filled with green, pink, yellow and blue patterns. Black-outlined filigree scrolls curl around the bird, with red, yellow and blue flourishes on the right. The bold colour and smooth outlines sit against bare skin on a dark background.

Neo-trad Calf Hummingbird Bird Scroll Swirl Filigree Flourish

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

The wall ran straight through the river, so the women on the north bank sent their news by bird. Marisol kept a clay dish of sugar water on the sill of her kitchen window, and every evening at the hour the bells rang across the water, a hummingbird came to drink from it, green as bottle glass held up to the sun.

Keep reading

Nobody had taught the bird its road. It carried messages folded small and tied to one leg with thread. Red thread meant the letter came from her cousin in the village of Santa Rosa, yellow meant a letter from the south bank, and blue meant nothing had happened, only that someone was thinking of her. The guards on the wall looked down at the water for smugglers and never up at the small green thing flickering above the reeds, and the bird knew how to pass where the wind folded over the stones.

One autumn the bird came late, with no letter at all, only a single black feather caught in the thread. Marisol knew then that her brother had been taken from the boats. She sat up three nights with the lamp lit and the dish full, not sleeping, watching the wall.

On the fourth evening the bird came back with a red thread knotted twice around its leg, which meant yes. Marisol tore the thread open with her teeth. Inside was one line in her brother's cramped hand, telling her to meet him at the old bridge at first light. She left the dish full and the lamp burning, and went out into the cold with her shoes in her hand.