Black script lettering reading Hope on the inner wrist, with the H drawn in teal as a looping ribbon shape.

Script word Hope on the inner wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo is the word Hope in a flowing black script, with a long swash on the H and a descending tail on the p. The capital H is drawn in teal, with its loop and crossbar forming a ribbon-like shape that crosses the black letters. The lines are fine and even, and the photo shows the tattoo on pale skin with the palm creases visible above it.

Lettering Forearm Hope Script Word Ribbon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The teal was the last of the pot, and Mrs Ferris said it would do for the H if I kept the brush thin. She stood at my shoulder in the shed behind the chandler's, arms folded over her good coat, watching the board on its trestles as if it might shift if she looked away.

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Her husband had been crew on the lifeboat that went out past the Ness in February and did not come back, along with two others. The harbour committee had voted to repaint the boathouse board with the names of everyone who had ever pulled an oar, the living and the drowned together, and she had asked only for one word to be added beneath them. She had not said why it had to be Hope, and I had not asked. Some words come with their reasons already attached.

I laid the long swash of the H first, sweeping it up from the left like a line paid out over the side, then came back for the loop in teal so that it crossed the black strokes and bent round them like a ribbon tied around a wrist. The o and the e I did quickly, letting the paint carry itself. The p was the hard one. I let its tail drop well below the baseline, down past the other letters, the way a rope goes down into water you cannot see the bottom of.

When the paint was dry she came close and read it slowly with her lips moving. She paid me in coppers from a handkerchief knotted at the corners. At the door she turned back and touched the green loop with one finger, very lightly, as if checking it was still wet. That was the colour he liked, she said, where the sea runs shallow over the sand and you can still see the bottom.