Wavelength and pulse-number tunable ultrafast vortex fiber laser

•An all-fiber passively mode-locked laser emitting ± 1 order ultrashort vortex pulses at 1.55 μm is constructed.•A two-mode chirped fiber Bragg grating with a broad bandwidth is used to select the high-order mode, for the first time.•The proposed fiber laser achieves wavelength and pulse-number tunable vortex pulses for the first time.•The pump hysteresis effect is observed in the experiment and analyzed theoretically.