On a battleship grey concrete wall, in the north side back alley of the 100 block of West Broadway Avenue, the word “HOPE” is written in arresting, fire engine-red, block capitals.

The tall letters are decorated, seemingly at random, with large white dots. Below is a smaller word in red that could be an artist’s signature reading “alin”.

A hop, skip and a jump to the west—in the 400 block of the same alley—is another graffiti by the same artist and almost in the same style.

This one reads “JOY”, although the legibility is impaired by disproportionately large dots superimposed over thin letter strokes.

I know that the more ambitious graffiti artists seem to love hiding meaning in plain sight. Physically, they want their street art to be blindingly obvious but, at the same time they clearly delight in using all manner of orthographic and visual trickery to obscure the actual meaning of their pieces,

But at first glance, these two pieces of street art appeared quite straightforward. I noticed both of them in late November and was prepared to associate the touchy-feely words and shiny Christmas tree ornament-like dots with the impending holiday season.

But the part of my brain that handles pattern recognition was expecting otherwise.

More lovely graffiti examples reveal underlying patterns

There were two more examples of graffiti by the same artist that I found in alleys alongside West Broadway but much farther west in the Fairview neighbourhood—both of them reading “LOVE”.

One is in an alley of the 1000 block and the other was in an alley of the 1300 block.

Unfortunately, the graffiti on the back alley wall of the Staples store in the 1300 block was painted over before I had a chance to photograph it. Fortunately, another homeless person snapped photos of it.

After literally weeks of negotiation with the paranoid fellow I won the right to photograph the photographs of the vanished graffiti off of the screen of his vintage Trashberry phone.

The meaning of the dots is found hiding in plain sight

When you see each of these graffiti works separately it’s easy to dismiss the large dots as meaningless decoration but taking the four examples together, I saw that the same letters were always overlaid with the same number and pattern of dots.

This led immediately to the correct assumption that the dots represented braille—the binary, tactile writing system that enables people who are visually impaired to read with their fingertips.

The number and arrangement of dots in all four pieces of graffiti always corresponds to the equivalent braille pattern for the letters they are superimposed over.

In this way, these four graffiti pieces can actually be treated as braille tutorials.

The trick to how the artist is “signing” their work

As a final bonus, knowing that the dots are braille allows us to properly decrypt the artist’s “signature”.

The three dots that always follow it are actually the braille equivalent of the letter D. And if we treat first letter, not as an oversized lower-case A, but as a reversed capital B, then the signature does not read as “alin” but rather as “Blind”.

I think everyone will agree that this makes a damn sight more sense.

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