Black script lettering reading Hope with a purple accent and a black outline butterfly on the inner wrist.

Hope script and butterfly on a wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo spells the word Hope in flowing black script, with the H picked out in a purple loop. A black outline butterfly with simple wing detail sits to the upper right of the lettering. The linework is clean and even, and the image is shot straight on against a dark background.

Lettering Forearm Hope Butterfly Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The road south of Harl Crossing ran so straight that the old carriers said it had been ruled with a plumb line, and nobody crossed it in the dry months unless they had no choice. Tobias Greaves had no choice. A wheel had gone at the salt flats, and his water barrel was down to a hand's depth when the dust rose behind him and a woman walked out of it carrying a tin cup.

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She asked for nothing. She sat in the shade of his cart and watched a butterfly come down out of the glare, pale as a bleached page, its wings edged in black. It settled on the rim of the barrel and opened and closed them slowly, as if testing whether the air would hold. "That one has come a long way," she said. "It only goes where there is water, so there must be some near." Tobias looked at the barrel, then at the empty road, and poured the last of his water into her cup without deciding to.

She drank half and handed it back. "Keep the rest for the mule," she said, and pointed with her chin at the bend ahead, where the sand lay darker. "Dig there, past the stone with the red mark. You will not like how deep it is, but you will reach it." He asked her name. She drew a loop in the dust, then another, then a long swooping line, and the wind took the marks before he could read them. When he looked up, the butterfly was gone and so was she.

He dug at the bend because he had nothing to lose, and at the depth of his own arm the sand turned cold and wet. The mule drank for an hour. Years later, when the carriers asked why there was a well at the bend with a painted stone above it, Tobias only said that it had been left for whoever came next, and that the word cut beside the stone was the one she had written in the dust.