Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hummingbird feeding from a lily

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A graphite pencil drawing of a hummingbird in flight, its long beak inserted into the centre of an open lily with visible stamens. The hummingbird has a long curling tail that ends in a spiral, and large leaves frame the lower part of the flower. The linework is soft and the shading is greyscale, with the petals and leaves shaded to show form on a plain pale background.

Botanical Hummingbird Lily Flower Leaves Stamen Scroll Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hummingbird came back to the lily bed on platform four the morning after they cancelled the 6.12, and I took it as a sign, though I could not have told you of what. Nobody else on the Cressford line seemed to notice. Mr Abernethy from the parcels office stepped over the bed twice a day with his flask and never once looked down.

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I had planted the lilies myself the spring my mother went into the home, three bulbs from a catalogue she had circled in biro, and they had come up orange and stubborn in the soot. The bird was no bigger than my thumb. Its tail trailed behind it in two long threads that finished in curls, like the iron scrolls on the old gaslight brackets, and every few minutes it dropped its needle beak into the throat of the bloom and hung there, humming, while the 7.40 ran through without stopping.

The letter from the estates office arrived on the Friday. The bed was to be cleared for a cycle store by April, lilies and all. I read it twice on the bench, then went to dig up the bulbs before anyone could argue, and that was when I found a brass key wedged beneath the bottom one, green with age and stamped with the number of a left luggage locker bricked up before my time.

I opened it that afternoon with a hacksaw blade and a great deal of swearing. Inside was a tin of letters in my mother's round hand, every one addressed to me and none ever posted. The hummingbird sat on the fence post watching me read. When the 4.15 pulled in, it lifted off and flew straight back to the open lily, as if it had been waiting for someone to finish.