Colour tattoo of a blue hummingbird with black brush strokes and pink dots on the upper arm, with the arm raised in a bedroom.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour hummingbird on an upper arm

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a teal and blue hummingbird in flight, with loose black brush strokes and small pink dots scattered around it. The bird and strokes have soft, painterly edges with no hard outlines, and the blue and teal tones fade into the surrounding skin. The arm is raised toward the top of the frame, so the tattoo fills the centre of the photo against a plain bedroom background.

Upper arm Hummingbird Bird Brush stroke Splashes Dot

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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 to the Marlow sisters' boatyard the week the tide took the old slipway, and nobody on Skerry Holm could say where it had flown in from. Ada swore it was the same bird that had nested in the fuchsia behind the chapel, though the fuchsia had been dead since her grandmother's time. It hung over the paint pots in the shed, blue-green as a mackerel's back, and flicked its beak at the black brushes as if it wanted to argue about the strokes.

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Her sister Nell thought it was an omen and said so at supper, over the herring. The fishermen had seen a bird like that before the winter the Greta went down with her whole crew, and the women of the island had taken to leaving saucers of sugar water on the windowsills. Ada only wanted the bird to stop knocking its head against the glass. She dipped her brush in teal and dragged it across the cheap paper the mainland gallery had sent, and the bird, which had been stitching the air above the nets, dropped down and sat on the wet edge of the colour.

By the next high tide the whole sheet was dappled with pink, where Nell had flicked her cochineal thread across it to mark the boats going out. Ada looked at the picture, then at the window, where the bird had gone. It had left a smear of blue on the sill, the exact colour of the sea beyond the Holm on a flat morning. She didn't wipe it off. Let the tide have the slipway. The bird had chosen the paper.