Colourful ornamental hummingbird tattoo with swirling patterns in pink, green, blue and red, placed on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental hummingbird on upper back

Back · Colour · Photo

A hummingbird in flight with its long beak pointing left, its body and wings filled with swirling, scroll-like patterns and dotted detail. The linework is dark and defined, with the fill colours in blue, green, pink, red and brown, and the bird sits centrally on a pale, softly lit area of upper back.

Back Hummingbird Bird Swirl Ornament Pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Okonedo's glaze never quite settled on the teapot, so she decided the bird on its side would have to do. Her son Tobi had painted it with a sable brush the width of a fingernail: a hummingbird, beak sharp as a hatpin, its body crowded with spirals like the ferns that grew over the chapel wall. Nobody bought the teapot. It sat on the windowsill of the workshop through a wet spring, and the light coming through the glaze turned the blue of the head the colour of the sea off Bude.

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Tobi was twelve and wanted to be a sign painter, not a potter. He said the bird was wasted on crockery. He stole a jar of gold size from the back shelf and painted a second hummingbird on the lid of the biscuit tin, then a third on the inside of the coal bucket, where nobody would see it until the coal ran low. By June the workshop was full of birds nobody had asked for, and his mother pretended to be cross and kept finding new places to hide the tins.

On the last day of June the tinsmith from the next street came in with a wheelbarrow of broken lanterns and asked whether anyone could repaint them. Tobi went home with a box of brushes and a promise of sixpence a lantern. He painted every one with the long beak pointing east, towards the harbour where his father had gone out on the herring boats and not yet come back. When the lanterns were hung along the quay that night, their light threw small quick shadows across the water, and his mother, watching from the step, said the birds looked as though they were trying to fly home.