Small black and grey fine line hummingbird tattoo in flight on the skin behind a person's ear, with the wing raised and the beak pointing forward.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hummingbird tattoo behind the ear

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A small hummingbird in flight sits on the skin directly behind the ear, with its wings raised and its long beak pointing forward. The piece uses fine black linework with grey shading across the wing feathers and body. The photograph is a close, well-lit crop of the ear and side of the head, with the bird as the clear focal point against plain skin.

Fine line Other Hummingbird Bird Wing Ear

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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, you lot, and mind the candle, because Brother Anselm never tells this one the same way twice and I won't have you saying otherwise. It was the year the orchard wall fell into the beck, and the abbot had sent for a bell-founder from Kendal. The man came up the hill with a mule and a grievance, and he brought his daughter Ysolde, who was nine and had never seen a living thing that wasn't destined for a pot.

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At Compline, while the brothers sang, a bird no bigger than a thumb came through the open shutter and hung in the air before the bell rope. Its wings moved so fast they were only a grey mist, and its long beak pointed at the child as though it had asked her a question. Ysolde did not scream. She held out one finger, and the bird, which had crossed the sea in the hold of some ship nobody would name, settled on it for the length of a Paternoster and then was gone.

The founder swore it was a devil. The prior said nothing, but he went to the sacristy and wrote in the book of hours a line about a small creature that drinks from flowers and never rests, and he underlined the word rests twice. Ysolde kept the feather it left on the sill. Forty years on, when she was ringing the great bell herself, she said she could still hear that hum over the lowest note.

So if the air ever moves against your cheek when there is no wind, don't swat at it. Now bank the fire and mind the stair. Brother Anselm has the feather in his sleeve, and he'll show it to you if you ask him nicely.