Black script word Hope with a purple ribbon and an outlined butterfly, tattooed on the wrist.

Hope script and butterfly on a wrist

Lettering · Other · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo reads Hope in black cursive script, with a purple ribbon looping through the letter H. A black outline of a butterfly sits to the right of the lettering, with its wings drawn in fine lines and partly filled. The lettering and butterfly are set across the wrist on a pale skin tone against a dark background.

Lettering Other Hope Butterfly Ribbon Script Wrist

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every October the butterflies came down out of the beech wood at Cold Harrow, and my grandfather said they were the last of the summer leaving on foot. I was nine the year I found the tin. It was wedged between two roots by the stile, rusted at the hinge, and inside a purple ribbon was folded around a ring of pressed clover and a scrap of paper that said only HOPE in pencil, the letters leaning as if they were walking uphill.

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I kept it under my bed for a fortnight. The ribbon smelled of woodsmoke and something sweeter. On the Sunday I took it back to the stile and tied it to the post, because I thought whoever wrote the word might come looking. Mrs Abernethy at the shop said the ribbon had belonged to the Corrigan girl who went to the city and never wrote home, and that the tin was just a tin. But the next morning the ribbon had moved. It was tied to the gate of the old lock-keeper's cottage, the bow turned the other way.

I followed the trail through the wood for three days, sleeping in the bracken with my coat over my knees. On the third evening I came out into a clearing where a woman sat on an upturned bucket, sketching a butterfly on the back of an envelope. She did not look up. She said the trick with a wing was to leave some of it empty, so the paper could breathe. Then she handed me the envelope, and it was addressed to me in her hand, with the same leaning letters.

I never learned her name. When I got home the tin was empty and the ribbon was gone from the stile. I still have the envelope, and when the first frost comes I check the beech wood, because the butterflies keep coming down, and so, every autumn, do I.