Close photo of a small Lettering tattoo on the inner wrist, with the word Hope in black script above a coloured pink awareness ribbon.

Hope script and pink ribbon on a wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows the word Hope in black script with a flowing capital H and a long tail on the first letter, set above a small pink awareness ribbon. The lettering uses solid black ink with soft edges, while the ribbon is shaded in pink and red tones with light highlights along its loops. The photo is taken straight on against a black background, with the design centred on the inner wrist.

Lettering Forearm Hope Script Ribbon Awareness ribbon

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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 brass in the Lantern Ballroom has gone green at the seams, and you spend Thursday afternoons rubbing it back with Brasso while Mrs Okafor's radio plays dance bands through the fanlight. Nobody asked you to do it. The committee voted to sell the hall in March, then changed its mind when the council's letter arrived with the word listed in it, and since then the place has been left to whoever still had a key.

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Behind the stage curtain hangs the old band leader's request board. Someone painted HOPE across it in curling black letters decades ago, and beneath the word a small pink ribbon, the sort sold on fête days for good causes. You never found out who did it. You only know the paint has held better than the plaster around it, and that the men who come to dust the rafters always stop to read it before they climb.

On the last Saturday of the month you open the doors for the first time in a year. Eleven people come, three of them on sticks, and they dance a quickstep to a gramophone record because no band can be paid. A man in a brown suit asks you for the foxtrot. You tell him you have two left feet. He says that is fine, he has been counting his steps since 1961 and still goes wrong on the turn.

When the record sticks you go up to lift the needle and see the board in the lamplight, the black script running over the pink loop. Somebody has to start the next song. You wind the gramophone, wipe your hands on your skirt, and step out onto the floor.