Hummingbird Tattoo Meaning
Vibrancy, energy, joy, and the beauty of small, swift things.
The hummingbird does what should not be possible: it hovers, flies backward, beats its wings thousands of times a minute, and crosses immense distances in a body that weighs almost nothing. The peoples of the Americas — where every hummingbird on earth lives — watched this tiny engine of impossible energy and saw something sacred: the soul of a fallen warrior, a messenger to the gods, the bringer of joy and the spark of life itself. The hummingbird is vitality concentrated past the point of reason — proof that the smallest thing can carry the most fierce and tireless life.
The supreme god of the Aztecs, the sun and war god who led them to their promised home and demanded the blood that kept the sun moving, was named Huitzilopochtli — 'Hummingbird of the South' (or 'of the Left'). That the most powerful and ferocious deity in the pantheon was named for the tiny hummingbird is the key to how the Aztecs saw the bird: not as delicate, but as the very image of the warrior's fierce, darting, tireless spirit.
The Aztecs believed that warriors who died in battle or on the sacrificial stone — the most honored deaths — were transformed after a time into hummingbirds and butterflies, and in that form they accompanied the sun across the sky and sipped nectar in a warrior's paradise. So the hummingbird was the returning soul of the brave dead, the war-spirit made small and brilliant and eternal. To the Aztec the hummingbird was the most fitting form a hero's soul could take: weightless, iridescent, fearless, and burning with an energy out of all proportion to its size.
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