Black and grey realism tattoo of three hummingbirds in flight across the lower back, with soft shaded clouds behind them.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three hummingbirds in flight on the lower back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

Three hummingbirds with long beaks and outstretched wings are shown in mid-flight, arranged across the lower back. The birds are rendered in fine black linework and smooth grey shading, with feather detail on the wings and tails. Soft, smudged grey shading behind the birds suggests clouds, and the image is a close photograph of the skin with a blue waistband at the bottom edge.

Realism Back Hummingbird Bird Wing Flight Cloud

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

The first one came aboard off the Azores, hanging in the wind over the bread tins like something that had forgotten how to land. Its beak was longer than its head. Hollis, who had cooked on these ships for thirty years and believed only in what he could salt, said it was a sign of weevils in the flour. I said it was a bird, dripped sugar water from a spoon onto the rail, and by the second watch there were three of them.

Keep reading

They stayed in the galley, darting between the steam off the copper pots and the grey fog pressing against the portholes. They would not perch. They hung at the height of a man's shoulder, wings a blur, then shot out through the hatch into the cloud and came back again. Hollis wanted them put over the side. I watched them and thought of my sister's kitchen in Falmouth, where her boy kept a jar of syrup on the sill for birds that never came.

On the fourth morning the sea lay flat and white as a plate. The birds went out through the hatch and did not come back. I carried the scraps bucket up on deck and saw them above the mainmast, three specks climbing into a bank of cloud so grey it looked painted on. They circled once, as if counting the ship, then the haze took them.

I kept the spoon. Some nights I hear wings tapping at the porthole, and I get up to fill it, and there is nothing there but the clank of cooling pots and the sea breathing under the hull.