Illustration of a hovering hummingbird in teal and green, with a dotted body and a body filled with fern and leaf shapes, drawn in a botanical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hummingbird with fern and leaf fill

Botanical · Colour · Flash

A hummingbird hovers in mid-flight, facing left, with a long dark beak and a round eye. Its head and upper body are filled with teal and green dotted and watercolour-like texture, while its lower body and tail dissolve into dark blue fern fronds and small green leaves with trailing stems. The wings are drawn as fanned, dark slate-green feather shapes against a plain white background.

Botanical Hummingbird Bird Fern Leaves Foliage Wing Feather Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last bird in the valley of Oss was not a bird, the grandmothers said, but the wind wearing a coat of ferns. It came each spring, in the years after the lowlands went under, to the terraces above Harrow Deep to drink from the rusted cups of the old pipe-heads, and nobody could say where it wintered, only that it always came back when the water ran clear.

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The year the glass company sent its men up the valley with theodolites and orange flags, the water had gone brown. Ilse Vantonge, who kept the seed vault at the top of the terraces, watched the flags move closer to her lettuce beds and went down to the spring with a shovel. She cleared the silt from the old channel for three days, her knuckles cracking, until the water came through bright and cold. On the fourth morning the bird arrived, hanging in the air before her face, its long black beak tipped towards the stream.

It drank, then turned its head and looked at her the way a clerk looks at a form that has been filled in correctly. When it flew, a trailing stem caught on the thorn of her sleeve. Ilse planted that stem in the wet ground beside the flags. By midsummer the fronds had spread over the survey pegs, dark blue as the bird's underside, and the men found that every blade they cut grew back thicker before the next dawn. They gave up and drove their trucks back down the road.

Ilse is dead now and the vault has a new keeper, but every spring the hum comes up the valley and the children of Oss tie red thread around the ferns where the pumps once stood. The bird still drinks from the spring. If you go up to watch, bring a little sugar water, and wait for it to come to you.