Fine line cursive script reading hope in pale ink on the forearm, shown in two close-up photographs of the same arm.

Hope script on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A thin cursive word, hope, runs diagonally along the forearm in a pale, light ink that sits close to the skin tone. The upper photograph shows the arm at a wider angle against a dark sleeve and pale fabric, while the lower photograph is a close crop of the same lettering. The linework is smooth and even with little shading, and the composition is simple, with the script as the clear focus.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Hope Script Word Cursive

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer the range, the pair of you, the wind's come round to the north and it's hunting for a gap under the door. Right. Shall I tell you about Nell Garrow and the frost? Her father kept the top field above Cold Harbour, and every January the snow lay so deep the ewes walked the drifts in single file. Nell had a stub of schoolroom chalk and not much else, and each morning before light she'd go out to the water trough and write on the ice with one finger, the same word every time, so her brother could see it from the high pasture and know the house still had a light in it.

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That was the winter the thaw didn't come. Her father sold the last heifer to pay the coal man, and Tom went up with the dogs to bring the flock down from the fell. Nell kept writing. Hope, in that loopy hand she'd learnt from a copybook, pressed into the frost on the byre window, and by noon the sun had lifted every letter back into the air. Folk coming up the lane laughed at her for a daft girl wasting her breath on glass. Then, one by one, they stopped laughing and started looking, and some of them began to write it too, on gateposts and the tops of churns.

Tom came down in March with the flock, thin as a fence rail but walking. He didn't come to the house first. He went straight to the byre, and the first thing he saw was no word at all, only the window running wet in the thaw. Then he saw how the light caught the glass at a low slant, and there it was, the faint pale shape of her finger where the frost had been pressed hardest, still holding the curve of the letters after everything else had gone.

So that's the trick of it. The thing you were meant to keep only shows when the light's low and you're looking for it. Mind the step on your way out, it's been loose since Christmas.