Painterly tattoo of a blue and red hummingbird with outstretched wings on the upper arm, with soft brushstroke-like shading.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour style hummingbird in blue and red

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A hummingbird with outstretched wings is tattooed on skin, shown in loose, painterly strokes. The bird's head, chest and wings blend from turquoise and blue into red, purple and green, with dark accents along the feathers and beak. The bird sits centrally against a plain, out-of-focus background, with the skin's texture visible around it.

Upper arm Hummingbird Bird Wing Feather

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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 had come aboard at Port of Spain, wedged in among the cocoa sacks and a crate of limes, and by the time the Kestrel Dawn cleared the Azores it had claimed the galley as its own. Teodor Marsh found it hanging at the hatch above the sink, wings a blur, working at the rim of a jam jar he had filled with sugar water for want of anything better. It was no bigger than his thumb, and the blue of it looked wet, as if someone had painted it in a hurry and not yet let it dry.

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He did not shoo it out. Thirty-one years at sea had taught him that a kitchen was a place things came to by accident and were fed or not, and he saw no reason to be the one who refused. He set the jar on the chopping board, went back to his onions, and listened to the small tick of wings behind him. When he turned, the red at its throat had caught the steam from the pan, and for a moment the whole bird looked lit from inside.

The second engineer wanted it gone. The bosun called it bad luck, then asked for a plate of whatever it was eating. The captain, who had grown up on a Devon farm and knew a swallow from a swift, said nothing at all, which Teodor took as permission. They ran into weather off Ushant. For three days the galley smelled of wet wool and burnt toast, and the bird slept in the lee of the spice rack with its head tucked under one wing, and Teodor fed it cut mango whenever the mango lasted.

At Falmouth, with the pilot boat alongside and the gangway already rattling, he opened the galley door onto the grey morning. The bird went out in a single bright line, past the derricks and over the harbour wall, its turquoise wings flaring once before it was lost among the gulls. Teodor rinsed the jam jar, dried it, and set it back on the shelf where it had always been, though nobody else would have guessed it had ever held anything but jam.