Watercolour-style hummingbird tattoo in pink, purple, blue and green with a black beak, on the inner forearm of a person wearing a striped sleeve.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour hummingbird on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A hummingbird in flight is shown with its wings spread and its long beak pointing right. The wings and body are rendered as loose, blended washes of pink, violet, blue and green with soft edges and no outlines, except for a dark beak and a small patch of detail on the head. The tattoo sits centrally on a pale forearm against a plain grey background.

Forearm Hummingbird Bird 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 bird came in on a coal wagon from the docks at Hartlepool, or so the lamplighter swore, though nobody in Bellhaven believed a word he said after the second pint. You found it on the washing line behind the institute, a fleck of green and violet hanging in the air where no bird had any business to hang, its wings going so fast they blurred into smoke. Your mother called it a sign. Your father called it a moth with ambitions.

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You had a box of paints from the stationer's on Front Street, half the pans already cracked, and a jam jar of rainwater that turned grey by teatime from the soot off the headgear. Every evening after the shift whistle you sat on the back step and tried to catch the bird in a wash. Wet the paper, drop in the pink, let the violet bleed down after it, then add blue where a wing ought to be. It never held still long enough for an outline, so you stopped drawing lines altogether and let the colour go where it pleased.

The night the roof came down at number three, the whole village climbed the hill in its coats. You stood at the fence with a sheet of paper folded in your pocket. When the lamps came up one by one from the cage, the bird rose out of the dark above the pithead and hung over the winding gear, bright as a struck match. Nobody else looked up. Your brother came out last, grey to the eyebrows and coughing, and you watched him pull off his cap and stare at the sky as though he had been waiting all his life for someone to tell him what colour it was.

Weeks later the painting was still stiff on the kitchen wall, curling at one corner where the damp got in. Your brother stood under it with his tea and asked what the bird was called. You didn't know. You told him it was the colour of getting out, then rinsed the brush in the jar, where the water had gone clear for once, and started on the second wing.