Realistic colour tattoo of a hovering hummingbird with green, teal and orange plumage and spread wings on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hummingbird in flight on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A hummingbird in mid-flight, shown in profile with its long beak pointing left and wings spread. The shading is soft and realistic, with smooth gradients across the green head, orange throat, pale belly and translucent grey wings. Vivid greens and teals dominate the palette, with warm orange and earthy brown accents, and the bird fills the centre of the frame against a dark background.

Realism Forearm Hummingbird Bird Wing Feather

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 bird came in on the back of the gale, and Morag found it wedged under the lee of the observatory water butt, no bigger than a walnut and quite still. Its beak was the length of a darning needle and its feathers had gone the colour of wet moss, all greens and teals that the grey light could not decide about. She carried it indoors cupped in both hands, feeling only a faint hum against her palms, like a bee shut in a jar.

Keep reading

Nobody on Skerra Holm had seen one before. Davie from the ferry brought a bag of caster sugar from the shop and said it was the only thing he knew of that fed hummingbirds, which Morag doubted, but she mixed it with warm water anyway and dripped it from the end of a pipette. For two days the bird sat in a shoebox lined with tea towels, its throat flaring orange every time the kettle clicked off. On the third morning it was on the windowsill, tail fanned against the glass, looking at the sea as if it had a timetable.

The wind had gone round to the south-west overnight. Morag eased the sash up an inch, then all the way, and the bird hung there for a long moment, wings a blur, before it shot out over the wall and the rhubarb patch. It came back once, circled the kitchen as if checking the room was empty, then lifted over the chimney and was gone towards the mainland.

She opened the log that evening and wrote the date, the wind, the species, and under remarks, after some thought, one line: fed well, flew well. She looked at it for a while, then added that the sugar was no use to anyone, and left the pipette on the sill for whoever came next.