Black script lettering reading Hope on the inner wrist of a light-skinned arm, beside a pearl and silver bracelet, with a second hand held alongside.

Hope script on a wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two hands are held together against a dark background, with one wrist showing the word Hope in flowing black script. The lettering has fine, tapered strokes with some shading, and the ink is greyish black. Silver chain and pearl bracelets sit on the other wrist, and red nail polish is visible on the fingers.

Lettering Forearm Hope Script Bracelet Pearl Hand Nail polish

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer, the fire's no good to a man with his back to the door. Aye, that's it. You'll have walked past the Ruth Carrow on the slip at Newlyn, the one with the stern lettering gone soft as butter. Nobody has repainted her since the war, and nobody will, for it was the last word old Jabez Penhale ever set on a hull. He did it in one afternoon with a sable brush no thicker than a pin.

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The fleet was going out into a February gale that the gulls had warned of for three days. Tamsin Hoskin came down the quay with a tin of lamp oil and asked Jabez to write something on her husband's boat, something that would hold. Jabez said he'd paint the name and nothing more, and she said the name was not enough. So he wrote HOPE across the transom, and he let the tails of the letters run long, looping under the H like a line paid out over the side.

Six boats went out. Five came back that week with their nets in rags. The Ruth Carrow came in last, on the Thursday, with her mast snapped at the thwart and Daniel Hoskin at the tiller, grey as the harbour wall. The first thing he did, before he'd even tied up, was ask the lad on the quay whether the lettering was still there. It was. The salt had lifted the paint at the edges, but the loops had held.

Every spring a young woman comes down to the slip and stands where the light hits the stern. She asks me whether it's still there. I tell her the sea has had its say on that boat more times than I can count, and the word is still on her, so I'd call that a fair answer.