Colour tattoo on an upper arm showing the word Hope in black script above a black heart outline and a pink and blue awareness ribbon.

Hope script with heart and ribbon on arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows the word Hope in black cursive script above a bold black heart shape that curls into a point. Below, a pink and light blue awareness ribbon loops around with a thin pink stripe across it. The ink is solid with crisp edges, and the design sits diagonally across the skin in a close crop.

Lettering Upper arm Hope Script Heart Awareness ribbon Ribbon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

At the top of the valley road stood a dance hall with no roof over its east end, so the stars came down onto the boards and the dancers stepped around them. Over the door someone had cut the word HOPE into the lintel, and the letters had gone soft with weather, so folk read it more from memory than from sight.

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Mabel Quill kept the hall for her uncle, who was too old now to lift the benches. Each Saturday the fiddler came up from the mill town with his bow wrapped in a strip of blue cloth. He had a habit of playing until the lamps guttered, and nobody could say why he would not stop, only that when he stopped, the dancers went home to cold kitchens. One winter he came up the road with the cloth gone, and his bow hand was bare and shaking.

Mabel had a spool of pink silk in her apron pocket, left over from a dress she never finished. She laid a length of it across the blue cloth as a thin stripe, then knotted the ends so the loop sat over the frog of the bow like a heart folding in on itself. "Play till the lamps are out," she said, "and then play once more for the road."

He played until dawn, and the loop held. When the sun came over the ridge the hall was empty, the stars were gone, and the fiddler was asleep on a bench with the bow across his knees. Mabel found that someone had scratched a bright new line beneath the word over the door, as if a hand had come up the road in the night and decided the old letters needed a second coat of mending.