Three wrists on a wooden table, each with a small black lettering tattoo reading DREAM, HOPE and LOVE in plain capitals on the inner forearm.

Dream, hope and love wrist lettering

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Three forearms rest on a wooden surface with the wrists angled toward the camera. Each wrist carries a single word in plain block capitals, reading DREAM, HOPE and LOVE from top to bottom, set in clean black linework with solid ink. The ink is black and grey with no colour, and the composition is evenly lit and centred on the three tattoos, with a striped sleeve and coloured bracelets at the edges.

Lettering Forearm Dream Hope Love Word Wrist Bracelet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lettering shop on Gull Lane had been Ted Pell's for thirty-one years, and in all that time he had never painted a word without first saying it aloud to the empty room. So when the fishmonger's daughter came in on a wet Tuesday with three scraps of paper, he read them out slowly, the way he read a bill of lading. DREAM. HOPE. LOVE. She wanted them small, in plain block capitals with no flourish, and she wanted them on a board that would hang over the harbour steps where the boats came in.

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Ted asked her why three and not one. She said the boats were three, and so were her brothers, and the sea took a word for every man who failed to come home. He did not believe her and he did not disbelieve her either. He mixed black with a little grey, ruled his guidelines in chalk, and worked for two days, letting each letter dry before he touched the next, because a wet letter bleeds into its neighbour and a smudged word tells a lie.

On the third morning the board went up. The gulls argued over it, the tide slapped under it, and by evening nobody on the quay remarked on it at all, which Ted took as a kind of success. Only the girl came back alone, and she stood looking at the middle word for longer than he thought any word needed.

"It's the wrong way round," she said. "Hope should be first." Ted looked at the three black words standing in a column above the water and saw that she was wrong about the order and right about everything else. He took down his brush, wiped it on a rag, and after a moment began again.