Upper arm tattoo of an orange awareness ribbon with black script reading Hope, flanked by grey and white feathered wings.

Winged orange ribbon with Hope script

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A close photograph of a tattoo on the upper arm showing a stylised orange ribbon with a looping lower tail, with a pair of feathered wings spreading from its top. The wings use grey and black shading with white highlights on the feather edges, and the word Hope is written in black script across the ribbon. The orange ribbon is filled with soft gradient shading, and the background is a plain dark sleeve and skin.

Upper arm Wing Feather Ribbon Awareness ribbon Hope Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the fire's only good for the front row. No, you, with the bad knee. Right. The ribbon-weavers of Harrow Mere never had a word for the thing they feared, so they dyed cloth orange instead and hung it from every gatepost in town, so the sea could see it when it came up the estuary at night.

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The cloth itself was nothing special. Madder-dyed, coarse, the sort you'd use to bind a cut. But Ada Quennell, who kept the dye vats behind the chapel, swore that if you ran a thumb down a strip after dark, it was warm, the way a hen's back is warm. She tied one to the boat of her son Tobiah the morning he went out past the Teeth, and she wrote on it in her cramped hand, one word. Hope. Then she worried it would fade, so she stitched the letters, and the thread ran out before the last e.

Tobiah came home three days later with the boat in splinters and no oars. He had nothing but the scrap of orange knotted at his wrist. The fishwives said that when the wind came off the water that night, the ribbon lifted from his hand and went up over the roofs. It didn't flutter. It beat, slow and heavy, like a pair of grey wings learning the air.

Ada never saw it fly. She only saw her son asleep by the stove with his hand open on the blanket. But every spring since, the gulls over Harrow Mere have carried orange threads in their beaks up to the cliffs, and where they drop them, something green comes up and reaches for the sun. That's the tale. Mind the step on your way out.