Fine line black script reading hope with a shaded black and grey bird beside it, tattooed on the inner forearm near the wrist.

Hope script and bird on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo of the word hope in flowing cursive script, with a small shaded bird in flight to the lower right. The script is drawn in a thin, even single line, while the bird uses soft grey shading to show its wings and body. The tattoo sits on the inner wrist and forearm against a softly blurred background.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Hope Script Bird

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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

The pigeon came in off the Tuesday bus from Calder Wells, the only thing from that town that ever arrived on time. I ran the post office counter at the crossroads, a tin-roofed room with a fan that clicked like a bad clock, and in nine years nobody had sent me anything by bird. It was grey and flat-footed, with a brass ring no bigger than a fingernail. Inside the ring was a strip of paper, and on it, in a loose looping hand, one word: hope.

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I knew the hand before I knew the word. My brother Teddy wrote like that, the long strokes trailing off the line as if he had somewhere better to be. He had left at nineteen in a borrowed truck with a promise to send for me, and the promise had gone the way of the truck. I had not seen his writing in six years. I stood with the paper between my fingers while the heat came off the road in sheets.

The bird would not settle. It walked the counter, pecked at the stamp tin, and looked at me with one orange eye as though I owed it money. I wrote my reply on a parcel slip, folded it small, and threaded it through the ring with a hairpin. Then I carried the bird past the petrol pumps to the edge of the highway, where the tarmac shimmered and the sky went on in every direction.

I opened my hand. For a moment it stayed put, and I thought it had decided to keep me company. Then it lifted, flat and quick, and banked east over the sage towards Calder Wells until I could no longer tell it from the glare. The slip said, in my own square capitals, WAIT FOR ME. It was the first honest thing I had written in years.