Colour tattoo of a green and teal awareness ribbon with black script reading Hope and a small hummingbird, placed on the back of the neck.

Hope ribbon and hummingbird on the neck

Lettering · Neck · Mixed · Photo

A green and yellow awareness ribbon with teal shading at the top has the word Hope written across it in black cursive script. A black hummingbird with a purple-shaded wing flies from the end of the lettering on the right. The ribbon has a white outline and soft colour blending, and the photo is taken from behind, showing the tattoo on the back of the neck.

Lettering Neck Ribbon Hope Hummingbird Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hush now, and mind the fire, because this is the part where Mrs Harcourt's boy goes out to the gate, and the snow is up to the shutters. Four days the road had been shut. Nobody at the Drover's Rest expected a visitor, least of all a bird.

Keep reading

Sixty years ago this inn kept a tin box of letters for the valley folk, and one of them was tied with a faded green ribbon, the sort the women sewed onto their coats when a husband went down to the pits. On the envelope someone had written a single word in looping ink, Hope, and the letters ran together so the H trailed off into a line like a branch. Nobody could read it without weeping, so they hung it on the hook by the door where it could do no harm.

The boy, Tobias, was seven and not sensible. On the fifth morning he saw a black speck hanging above the frozen trough, its wings blurring like a thrown spark. It was a hummingbird, in January, which is not a thing that happens. It hovered at the ribbon on the hook, then at the boy's red nose, then flew straight out into the white and was gone.

They followed its track after the thaw and found, under the last hawthorn, a tin cup full of nectar that had frozen solid. Nobody knows who filled it. I have my own idea, but I am old and I say what I like.

So when the road opens and your own cold feet reach the gate, look for the thing that refuses to be still. Hope is never the bird that waits. It is the one that drinks, and goes on.