Watercolour-style hummingbird tattoo in purple, pink, blue and green on a forearm, with a pale grey background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour hummingbird on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A hummingbird in mid-flight is shown with its wings spread and a long beak pointing right. The shading is soft and blended, with loose splashes of purple, pink and blue forming the wings and tail. Teal and green tones fill the body against a plain pale background, with the forearm placed centrally in the frame.

Forearm Hummingbird Bird Watercolour Wing

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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 hummingbird came through the vent of the Palm House on the third Tuesday of October, while Ada Pell was up a stepladder scrubbing the glass for the Haverleigh estate. It hung above her palette on the windowsill, wings blurring, as though it had mistaken the wet cobalt and rose madder for something sweet. She had been trying all morning to get the Lowestoft sea right, and every wash came out grey.

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The bird belonged to the curator, a green-throated mango bought from a dealer in Liverpool and never given a name. He had told her it was delicate and that she should keep her ladders away from the ferns. Ada climbed down and fetched a square of muslin, but the bird dodged each swipe and left streaks of violet hanging in the air where it had been, as if the room itself were bleeding colour. After a while she gave up chasing it and sat on the bench with her brush in her lap.

She painted it instead, quickly, letting the pigment run into the paper so the edges dissolved. The bird came down to rest on the rim of her water jar, tail fanned, and watched her with one black eye. When she looked up again the vent was open and the sky beyond it was the exact pale teal she had been searching for.

That evening the curator found a smear of blue on the inside of the glass, roughly the shape of a wing, and a single beak drawn in the corner of Ada's commission sheet. He did not ask her to clean it off.