Fine line black tattoo of a hovering hummingbird with dotwork shading on the wings, on the upper arm.

Hummingbird on an upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A hummingbird in mid-flight, with its wings spread and long beak pointing upward, is drawn in thin black linework. Dotwork stippling shades the wings and body, while the tail feathers are outlined with fine strokes. The design is in black ink on pale skin and sits on the upper arm against a plain light wall.

Fine line Dotwork Upper arm Hummingbird Bird Wing Feather

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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 lot of you, the lamps are dying and I'll not shout the rest. Michaelmas, eighteen ninety-one, and Harrow's Travelling Wonders had pitched on the cinder ground behind the gasworks. Among the strongman and the fire-eater there was a tin box no bigger than a biscuit tin, and in it, so Ada Harrow swore, lived a bird that had crossed the whole ocean in a sailor's cabin, fed on sugar water and spite.

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Nobody believed her until the lid came off in the big tent. The bird did not perch. It hung in the air before the paraffin lamp, wings a blur you could not properly see, beak lifted to the dark as though it had found a sum it liked. Tom Pardew, who sold toffee apples and had never kept still a day in his life, went quiet as a church. Ada said the bird was hunting the last foxglove in England. Tom said it was looking for the way home.

The fair moved on in October, and the bird went with it. Ada kept the tin under her bunk in the wagon, and every morning she lifted the lid and let it circle her wrist once before it settled. Then came the frost, and the box stood empty on the shelf. Ada said the bird had gone where it was needed. Tom said she had let it go off the cliffs at Dover, where the wind comes straight across from France.

So here is what the old wagon men taught me. Hold your hand still at a lamp in the autumn, and sometimes a speck of green fire will come and hover at your knuckles. Don't reach for it. Just keep your hand where it is, and let it decide.