Two matching forearm tattoos of the words Hope, Faith and Love in black script with swirling flourishes and a yin yang symbol at the end.

Hope Faith Love script on both forearms

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two forearms show matching black script tattoos reading Hope, Faith and Love, with scrolling flourishes above and below the words. A solid black yin yang symbol sits at the end of the lettering on each arm. The linework is bold and the shading is mostly solid black with soft grey tones, and the photo is taken straight on against a red and white tiled background.

Lettering Forearm Hope Faith Love Script Yin yang Swirl Flourish Matching

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You reach Sallow Creek with the fuel light blinking and a dog asleep on the passenger seat that belongs to nobody you know. The pump outside the Halfway Cafe has been dead since March, and a woman in a faded boiler suit is sitting on an upturned crate under the awning, scraping paint off a board with a putty knife. "Don't mind me," she says without looking up. "Getting the old words off so I can put new ones on."

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The boards are nailed either side of the cafe door, one for each of the brothers who ran the place. On the left, a single word in looping red capitals: HOPE. On the right, FAITH and LOVE, stacked and shadowed, with curls painted so carefully that the tails run out past the wood. Each board has a black and white disc at its end, and she tells you the brothers painted them the same summer the highway was diverted and the town started to empty. They never spoke again after that. Not one word across a counter for nineteen years.

She stops scraping and turns one board toward you. The swirl on the left is solid black. The swirl on the right has been shaded grey, soft at the edges, as though someone spent a long evening going back over it with a finer brush, trying to lift the darkness out. Her name is Marguerite, and she says she was asked to paint over both boards and make them match, and that the only thing she could never decide was which half of the disc to keep.

She hands you the sandpaper. "Do the flourishes," she says. "My hands have gone." You work the curl under the F until the old red comes off in fine dust, and beneath it, faint as a pencil note, are two words in a hand you don't recognise: come home. Behind you, the pump clicks and starts to hum, and the dog lifts its head from the seat.