Black cursive script reading Hope with a pink awareness ribbon woven through the letters, tattooed on the top of a foot.

Hope script with pink ribbon on the foot

Lettering · Other · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows the word Hope written in flowing black cursive script across the top of the foot, with a looped flourish extending beyond the final letter. A pink ribbon, shaded to look soft and slightly translucent, is wound through the middle of the lettering. The linework is clean and the ink appears crisp against the skin, with the design centred and fitted to the curve of the foot.

Lettering Other Hope Awareness ribbon Cursive Foot

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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

Now sit yourself down, our Margaret, and mind the coal scuttle. You want the story of the sign-writer's boy, the one who came to Thornby the winter the mill chimney fell. Everybody knew him as Alfie Crabtree, though his mother called him Alfred when she was cross, which was often.

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Alfie had a brush hand as steady as a surgeon's, so when Mrs Pell at the corner shop wanted her window done for the Coronation, he was the one sent for. He stood on a ladder in the frost with a pot of black enamel and a little tin of rose lake, and he painted the word HOPE in those swooping letters that looked like they were walking off the glass. Then he curled the tail of the final E right round into a loop, and he wound a pink ribbon through the middle of the word, soft as a sugared almond, because Mrs Pell's daughter had sent it up from London wrapped in tissue paper.

Folk stopped to look. Old Walter from the allotments said it was the first thing in Thornby since the war that didn't need apologising for. Children pressed their noses to the glass and fogged it, and Alfie wiped it clean with his sleeve each time, grinning like a fool.

Now, the ribbon. Mrs Pell swore it was the only thing on that high street the frost couldn't get at. Come March, a gale tore the shop sign off its hooks and sent it rolling down to the river, but the window held. They found the ribbon in the spring, bright as the day it was tied, still stuck to the glass after the shutters came down. Alfie kept that tin of rose lake on his shelf until the day he died, and he never once painted anything else with it. That's the whole of it, love. Put the kettle on.