Close up of two ankles with purple script lettering reading Hopeless and Romantic, with small flourishes, worn above pink canvas trainers and rolled denim.

Hopeless Romantic script on both ankles

Lettering · Ankle · Colour · Photo

The photograph shows two ankles, one tattooed with the word Hopeless and the other with Romantic, both in flowing script lettering with small decorative flourishes beneath. The linework is solid and even, filled in a single shade of purple. The framing is low and centred on the feet, with rolled blue denim above and pink lace-up trainers below.

Lettering Ankle Script Word Flourish

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Okonedo came into the shop on Tuesday with a fistful of old receipts and asked me to paint a word on her gate. Not a name, she said, a word. I asked which. She tapped the back of a receipt where she had written it twice in pencil, once with the H too tall and once with the y dropping off the edge as if it had somewhere better to be. Hopeless Romantic. Her husband had called her that for forty years, usually when she had bought another packet of seed though the beds were already full.

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I told her the flourish would need a day to dry. She said she had the day, and the rest of the summer besides, and she sat on my stool with her hands in her lap while I loaded the sable brush with the deep plum I keep for wedding sashes and the occasional headstone. I laid the H down first, one clean stroke with the spine of the brush turning under it, and after that the rest of the word came easily, as if the letters had been waiting under the paint.

When I finished she said nothing for a long time. Then she asked whether I could do the second word on the other gate, the one by the potting shed, because that was the one he used to lean on while she argued with the slugs. I said yes before I had thought about the price. She laughed and said that was the romantic part, and I said it was the hopeless part, and we agreed it was probably both.