Two green and blue hummingbird tattoos on a shoulder and upper chest, with a black bra strap visible beneath them.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two hummingbirds on a shoulder and upper chest

Shoulder · Colour · Photo

Two hummingbirds are tattooed on the upper chest and shoulder, one with its wings raised and beak pointing left, the other in flight towards the upper right. The birds are rendered with soft shading and fine detail in green, teal and blue ink, with pale highlights along the wings. The skin tone is neutral and the composition is cropped close to the collarbone and shoulder, with a black bra strap in the lower frame.

Shoulder Chest Hummingbird Bird Wing Flight

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Marisol had been feeding the bird for nine nights before she admitted it was no moth or stray from the glasshouse on Hyde Road. It came to the back sill of the flower stall at a quarter to two, when the market lorries had finished unloading and the streetlamps buzzed orange over the wet cobbles. She kept a saucer of sugar water beside the buckets of lilies, and each night the thing hung in front of her face, wings blurring to nothing, and drank as if it had a train to catch.

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Her brother Teo said it was an escapee from a collector in Chorlton and someone would come asking. Nobody came. The ledger on the nail by the till had columns for stems and buckets but none for birds, and the night-shift man who sold her diesel swore hummingbirds couldn't survive a Manchester February. This one did. Under the bulb its back shone a green so bright it seemed wet, with teal running through it, and when it turned its head she noticed a second bird on the scaffold of the old mill across the road. It was duller, a blue like slate after rain, and it sat perfectly still as if waiting its turn at the saucer.

On the tenth night there were two of them. They took the sugar water in turns, one hovering, one perched on the peeling paint of the sill, and Marisol stood with the stem knife in her hand and didn't move for a long time. Then the bigger one lifted, wings raised like a question, and shot off over the rooftops towards the canal. The blue one followed a breath behind, a small streak against the orange sky.

She wrote the date in the ledger under stems, crossed it out, and wrote it again under birds. Then she carried the lilies in, rinsed the saucer, and left it full, because the sky was already paling over the mill and somewhere out past the rooftops a pair of wings was getting lighter by the mile.