Black ink drawing of a tattoo design on lined paper, showing the word Hope in flowing script combined with an anchor, with no body placement shown.

Hope script entwined with an anchor

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A black marker drawing on lined notebook paper of a tattoo design. The word Hope is written in looping cursive, with a large swooping H that forms part of an anchor shape hanging below it. The lines are bold and even, with solid black ink and no shading or colour.

Lettering Hope Anchor Script Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last waltz at the Gull always went to whoever had nobody to dance with, and that February it was me. Mr Pryce had stopped asking after the Hesper at the piano, and the cloakroom girls had stopped pretending they weren't watching me check the clock over the door. I stood by the potted palm in my mother's blue shoes, turning Tom's dance card over in my fingers until the pencil marks went soft.

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He had left it on the hook behind the cloakroom hatch the night before the ship sailed, the way he left everything he didn't want to carry. Down one margin he'd drawn the anchor he always drew on things, a fat hooked thing, and somehow he had made the big H of a word swing down and curl round its shank. HOPE, the letters ran, the O looping through the P like rope through a ring, and beneath it in smaller capitals, BACK BY THE HERRING. Mam had laughed at that for a week and then stopped laughing, and she kept the card in the tea caddy where the tea never ran out.

Eddie from the ticket box crossed the floor with his cap in his hands, not smiling. "Ada," he said, "the harbour office has had a wire." Behind him the band kept playing, Mr Pryce's left hand still rolling the bass. The wire said the Hesper was in. It did not say Tom was on her, and I had decided, somewhere between the palm and the door, which of those two things I was going to believe.

I walked out onto the pier with the card in my fist, the wind coming off the water hard enough to lift my hair. Under the lamp I read the H once more, all those loops closing round the anchor, and then I went down the steps to find out which of us had been right.