Black linework and purple wash drawing of a skull combined with a hummingbird, flower and feathers, shown as a tattoo design on a white background.

Skull, hummingbird and flower design

Dotwork · Mixed · Flash

A detailed drawing of a skull formed from flowers, feathers and dotted patterns, with a hummingbird in flight at the upper right. The linework is fine and ornamental, with dotwork fills and zentangle-style texture. Purple and black ink washes sit across the feathers and dots, against a plain white background.

Dotwork Botanical Skull Hummingbird Flower Feather Dot Bird

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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

The last wagon was already hitched when Ivy found the banner folded beneath the lion's straw, and she stood in the wet grass for a full minute before she dared unfold it. Teodor had painted it the spring the big top first leaked, a skull built from roses and peacock feathers, a hummingbird hanging at its shoulder like a question. Rain had got into the folds over the winter. The purple had run in tongues down one side, and a third of the dots had flaked to bare cloth.

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She sat on an upturned crate by the cookhouse, tin of Indian ink open on her knee, and dipped a steel nib into it. Each dot she placed was a small argument with the damp. Pemberton had already agreed the price with a man from a scrapyard in Boston, and the banner was going with the rest, the ticket cart, the calliope with its missing D, the wooden horses that had once carried a whole town's children round in circles. Ivy did not argue. She had sewn the sequins on the ringmaster's coat for nineteen seasons and knew what a crowd of eleven people on a wet Tuesday sounded like.

By dusk the lamps were being doused one by one along the row of vans. She reached the hummingbird last, because it was the hardest to get right. Its wing was a fan of tiny ink strokes that her eyes kept losing, and her thumb smudged the tip of one feather as she blew across it to dry.

She folded the banner into quarters and buttoned it inside her coat, against the wool. In the morning the field would be bare and the crows would have the cookhouse scraps, but the bird would still be flying, a little blurred at one wingtip, where she had got to it too late.