Black script tattoo of the word Hope, with an awareness ribbon forming the final letter, on a close-up of skin.

Hope script with ribbon on skin

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A close-up photograph of a black script tattoo spelling the word Hope. A ribbon shape, similar to an awareness ribbon, links into the final letter. The ink is solid black with fine, flowing linework, and the reddened skin around it is visible.

Lettering Other Hope Ribbon Script Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The boat was called Hope long before my mother bought the lease, and the name had been painted on her bow in curling letters that the salt kept lifting. Every March I took the brush down from the hook in the net store and went over them, one stroke for each letter, while the gulls argued on the slipway. Nobody on Skerra asked why I bothered. They simply watched the ferry come in on Tuesdays and counted the sailings.

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The ribbon was my father's idea. He tied a strip of grey cloth to the tiller the winter before he went out to the Stacks and did not come back, and he said a boat should carry something to show what she was waiting for. I never untied it. When the wind got into the cloth it cracked like a small sail, and the crossing to Ardvale always felt shorter with that noise at my back.

Last autumn a boy from the mainland, seventeen and sullen, asked me to take him across in fog. I said no, then yes, because the sky over the Sound had a yellow edge that meant weather by dusk. He sat in the stern holding the grey ribbon in both fists, and somewhere past the buoy he started talking about his brother. I kept my eyes on the compass and let him talk until the lights of the pier came up through the murk.

At the landing he gave the ribbon back, folded small, and I tied it to the tiller again without thinking. The paint on the bow had flaked off the p, and I would fix it in March. I still believe hope is a thing you can only spell out one letter at a time, but that boy had carried it across the Sound in both hands, and I could not think of a better way to make a crossing.