Coloured pencil tattoo design of a hummingbird in flight above a banner reading FOREVER AGO and trailing ribbons, in a traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hummingbird with Forever Ago banner

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A hummingbird in mid-flight is drawn with a long beak, green plumage and a pink throat, with its wings spread. A yellow ribbon banner above it reads FOREVER AGO, and further ribbons loop and trail down the left side and curl to a point at the lower right. Soft grey shading gives the bird and ribbons depth against a cream paper background, with faint light rays behind the bird.

Traditional Hummingbird Bird Banner Ribbon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the wind off the moor has teeth tonight, and the tower keeps no roof to hold the heat. You want the bird? Everybody wants the bird. Very well. The lord of Harrowgate Keep had a daughter called Ysolde who would not leave the battlements, because from there she could see the road to Dunmere, and on that road rode the miller's son, Tam Greave, who had promised to come home before the wheat was cut.

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The wheat was cut twice and Tam did not come. So she tied a yellow ribbon to the smallest bird that ever found its way up the broken stair, a green thing no longer than her thumb with a throat like a coal just catching. She murmured her message into its feathers and let it go east. It flew faster than the lord's best hawk and faster than the rain, and it never stops for weather or sleep, which is why, to this day, it hangs over the flowers and will not settle.

Tam had died of a fever at Candlemas, but nobody thought to tell the bird. Every morning it came back to the tower with its ribbon trailing, and every morning Ysolde untied the little scroll, read the same words she had sent, and tucked it back beneath the wing. She would climb the stair and watch the road again. The keep has no lord now, and no daughter either, only the wind and the walls.

If you stand beneath the broken arch at first light, you will see a green speck tug at a ribbon and dart off down the valley, still looking for a man who went forever ago.