Colour tattoo of a hummingbird in flight with green, blue and purple feathers and soft purple watercolour splashes, on the side of a ribcage.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hummingbird with watercolour splashes on ribs

Realism · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A hummingbird with outstretched wings and a long thin beak is shown in flight, with realistic feather detail in the wings and tail. Its head and body are shaded in green and teal, with purple tones across the chest, and loose purple watercolour splashes surround the bird. The tattoo sits on the side of the ribs and is photographed from a slight angle against a plain background.

Realism Ribs Hummingbird Bird Watercolour Splash 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

Now sit close, because the lamp needs winding and I won't climb those stairs twice for you. The autumn my father kept the light on Skerrin Rock, a storm blew in from the west so hard the gulls gave up and sat in the sea. On the third night a thing came hard against the glass, a scrap of green and violet no bigger than a thimble, and it hung there in the beam, beating its wings so fast they were only a blur.

Keep reading

My father opened the gallery door and it dropped into his palm like a spilt jewel. Its throat was the colour of a bottle held up to the sun, its breast went plum where the lamp caught it, and when it lifted its wings the spray off the sea hung on its feathers in little dark freckles. He said it had come a thousand miles over water, and I told him that was nonsense, but he swore it looked like something painted by someone who had got the rain on the page and let it run. The bird sat on his thumb and studied the lamp as if it knew the way to the mainland and thought poorly of it.

We kept it in a biscuit tin lined with my mother's old wool stockings and fed it sugar water from a teaspoon. By morning the storm had blown itself out and the sea lay flat and grey, and the bird was restless, flicking at the tin lid. My father carried it up to the gallery in the first light. It went straight out over the railings, circled the lamp once, and dropped toward the water, and for a moment I thought we had killed it with kindness.

Then it rose, a little spark of colour against the grey, and went east, toward the land nobody on Skerrin had seen in forty years. My father put the tin away and said nothing. Some nights, when the wind is wrong, I still think I see that flash of green over the water, and I tell myself it is only the lamp.