Colour tattoo of a hummingbird, orange lily and blue butterfly with green leaves on an upper arm, in a realistic botanical style.

Hummingbird, lily and butterfly on an upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A hummingbird in flight with a long red-tipped beak hovers above an orange lily with green leaves and stems, and a blue butterfly sits beside the flower. The feathers, petals and wings are rendered with soft gradients and fine detail, with blended greens, blues and oranges. The design wraps across the upper arm and shoulder, with the wings extending towards the outer arm.

Realism Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Hummingbird Lily Butterfly Flower Leaves Stem Wing Bird Insect

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Don't you go reaching for that trowel till I've finished, or the bird will have your knuckle for a snack, and I'd not blame her. Mrs Ashdown's tiger lilies were the talk of Lower Pennick that summer, orange as a fox's back, and the whole village leaned over the hedge to look at them. Nobody looked at the bird, mind. Nobody believed in one.

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It came in August, a green and blue thing with a beak like a red pin, from the travelling fair that had broken down on the common. Mr Hollis, the showman, swore it would be dead by the first frost, and he was too proud to go back for it. Instead it hung in the air at the throat of each bloom, wings going so fast you couldn't see them, while Mrs Ashdown stood at the kitchen window with her tea going cold in her hands.

A swallowtail came after it, blue as a gas flame, with a torn wing it dragged about like a bad coat. The two of them quarrelled over the same lily every morning until she set out a saucer of sugared water on the path, one saucer for each of them. She said the flower never minded who drank from it, so long as they were gentle about it.

The frost came in October, just as Hollis had promised. She found the bird on the windowsill one morning, still as a brooch, and the butterfly folded on the lily beside it. She didn't bury them. She left the lilies standing, dead stalks and all. Come spring, they pushed up orange again, and I'll tell you the truth of it, there was a streak of blue in the petals that had never been there before.