Bold black lettering tattoo reading HOPE across the upper back, with the words INSIDE ALL OF US IS inside the O, in a lettering style.

HOPE lettering tattoo across the upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo spells HOPE in large, heavy block capitals across the upper back. The O contains a circle with the words INSIDE ALL OF US IS... in small capitals, and a small sprout or leaf mark sits on the P. The ink is dark and appears to be black or near black, with clean, even edges against pale skin on a plain background.

Lettering Back Hope Lettering Quote Text

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down on the wall, Pip, and mind the nettles, they've been waiting all winter for you. You want the story of the Hallam bed? Right. Your great-grandmother Edie had a plot behind the coal shed where nothing would grow. Clay like wet concrete, and the frost lay on it till noon. The men from the council said dig it out and bring in topsoil. Edie said she'd had enough of men telling her what the ground wanted.

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So one March she took a jam jar, a bit of cotton wool and a sheet of newspaper, and she sat on that wall every morning with a cup of tea going cold beside her. Nobody asked what she was waiting for. The neighbours thought she'd lost her wits, and maybe she had a bit, but she kept at it. Every day she'd tip the water in, sniff at the jar like a dog, and say nothing at all.

By May there was one green curl pushing up through the clay, no bigger than a fingernail. She knelt down, put her face close and said, out loud, "Well, there you are." Then she went indoors and wrote on the back of an empty seed packet, in her neat school hand, the thing she'd always told anyone who would listen: the ground's got more in it than you think. Inside all of us is... and she never finished the sentence, because she said the rest was for whoever came next to fill.

That bed fed this street for thirty years, and it started with a jar and a stubborn woman sitting on a wall. Now pass me the trowel and stop fidgeting.