Watercolour-style hummingbird tattoo in blues, greens, purple and yellow on the upper back, near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour hummingbird on upper back

Back · Colour · Photo

A hummingbird in mid-flight with outstretched wings and a long thin beak, drawn with soft, loose edges and blended washes of colour. The palette is mainly blue, green and purple with touches of yellow and pink, and the bird is set against plain skin on the upper back.

Back Hummingbird Bird Wing

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 stationmaster at Wexcombe kept a rule about birds: none in the waiting room, none in the ticket office, and none on the platform after the last milk train. So when a hummingbird came in through the broken skylight one wet March and hung above the ticket window, beating its wings so fast they blurred into mist, Harold Penhale sent for his daughter Maud, who was the only one in the village who could coax a stray cat out from under a goods wagon.

Keep reading

"It is only a bird," Maud said, though it was not like any bird from the hedgerows. Its wings were the blue of the pond before rain, its back the green of new bracken, and at its throat was a smear of purple like crushed foxglove. Where it flew it left a faint wash on the air, and the clerk swore a yellow thread of it caught on the telegraph wire. The bird would not settle. It went to the signal box, the water tower, the station clock, and always came back to the same gap in the iron fence where the old siding ran down towards the quarry.

Maud followed it with a lamp. Under the ash trees she found a goods wagon with its doors rolled back, and inside, among the sacks, a travelling painter's box of pans, the colours cracked and dry from years of waiting. The bird dropped onto the open lid and drank from the wet rim of a brush, and for a moment it was so bright in the lamplight that Maud had to shut her eyes. When she opened them the bird was gone, and the box was wet.

That summer she painted the station's name board herself, one letter at a time, with the paints from that box. Harold grumbled that the lettering was too pretty for a railway. But the trains ran on time, the skylight stayed open, and every March, when the rain came, a small bright shape hung over the ticket window and nobody thought to shoo it out.