Black script tattoos reading blame, hate, love and promise, one word on each of four fingers of a hand held against a pale background.

Blame, hate, love and promise on fingers

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A hand is raised with the fingers spread, and each finger carries one word in black script lettering: blame, hate, love and promise. The linework is fine and even, with the letters following the curve of each finger. The image is in monochrome against a soft, pale grey wall, with the focus kept on the tattoos.

Lettering Fine line Hand Love Promise Script Word Finger

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now, you want to know how Edwin Marl got the forest to give back his boy. Sit close, the fire's low. He went up past the last gate of Thornwick with his hand held out flat, the way you'd show a dog you had no stone in it. On his fingers, in ink he'd bought off the pedlar, he'd written four words, one to a finger, so he would not forget which was which when the time came to speak.

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Blame sat on the first finger, the one that points. Hate on the next, because a man has to be honest with the trees. Love came third, then promise, short and stubborn on the smallest, the one that had held his son's hand at the christening. He walked until the birches thinned and the owl stopped asking its question, and there stood the old oak with a door in its roots and a voice coming out of it like wet leaves.

'You have brought me a list,' said the oak.

'I have brought you a hand,' said Edwin, and he opened it so the light fell across the words. The oak read them slowly, the way the slow read anything, from the top finger down. It said blame was a heavy thing to carry in and out of a wood. It said hate had worn thin from holding. It said love was the only one it could not weigh at all, and promise it had seen broken a thousand times by men with clean hands.

So Edwin curled the first two fingers down, one at a time, and left them at the root. Then he kept his love and his promise straight, and the door in the oak swung open for the boy, who came out blinking, holding his father's littlest finger the way he always had.