Black ink tattoo of the word hope in cursive script running along an arrow with feathered fletching, on a forearm.

Hope script and arrow on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink tattoo of the word hope written in cursive script along the shaft of an arrow, with the arrowhead pointing up and left and feathered fletching at the lower right. The linework is clean and even with solid black fill and no shading. The image is a close, slightly angled shot against a plain skin tone, with a dark knitted fabric and a metal object at the left edge.

Lettering Forearm Arrow Hope Script Word Feather

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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

Put another log on, and mind the draught under the door, because I'm not telling this twice. The winter the Ashdown beck froze to the bottom, old Harry Pike had three ewes stuck in the drift above the top field and no way to dig them out before dark. He stood in the yard with his bow over his shoulder, which was a daft thing to carry to a snowfield, and he told his boy Sam that no rope in the barn would reach them over the wall.

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So Harry took his best arrow, the one with the grey goose fletching his father had cut, and before he nocked it he scratched a word down the shaft with a nail. Sam asked him what that was for. Harry said an arrow goes where you look, and the word was so he'd remember what he was looking for. He drew and loosed up the slope, and the arrow went high and left over the drift, the way a rook climbs when it's frightened, and it came down among the ewes with a length of twine trailing from its nock.

The ewes wouldn't budge for the arrow, but the twine did what twine does. Sam hauled the line in hand over hand until the rope came after it, and then the ewes came out one by one, stepping in the boys' tracks as if the snow itself had been told where to put its feet. Harry never got the arrow back. Sam did, years later, when the old barn came down, and he read the scratched word aloud to his own children, and they asked him what it meant.

It's still up on the beam above the kitchen door, if you look. Mind your head going under it.