Pencil sketch of an open hand with the words Promise, love, PROVOKE, DIRECTION and Good Luck written around the fingers, shown as a tattoo design idea.

Hand sketch with word designs

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of an open hand, viewed from the palm side, with five words placed near the fingers and above the hand. The words use mixed lettering styles, with some in a plain sans serif, some in a looser script and some in a bold hand-drawn face. The shading is soft and greyish with blue-toned linework, set against a faded, textured grey background with darker edges.

Lettering Hand Hand Sketch Promise Love Finger Word

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

There was once a lift in a tower block at the edge of a grey town that would not climb past the ninth floor unless a person asked it properly. The people above the ninth had mostly stopped asking. Only old Mrs Adeyemi on the fourteenth still went down each morning with her palm open, the way her mother had taught her, and pressed it flat against the brass panel.

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She had five words written along her fingers in faded blue ink, and the lift had come to know them over the years. Promise sat on the little finger. Love sat beside it. Provoke ran across the middle, where the car could read it first thing, and Direction went along the ring finger so the machine knew which floor it was meant for. Good Luck was written on the thumb, the part you pressed last and hardest.

One winter the lift stopped answering. Kwame from the flats below, nine years old and bored of school, rode it up and down all night with a torch and a screwdriver he was not allowed to use. At dawn he found Mrs Adeyemi sitting on the car floor, her hand still against the panel, asking it to take her down so she could catch the early bus to the hospital where her sister lay. The panel stayed dark. Kwame put his small palm over hers without asking, and the car gave a low hum like a cat deciding something.

The doors closed. They went down together, the boy saying nothing, the old woman saying nothing, the five words warm between their hands. At the ground floor the doors opened on a morning full of buses. Kwame never told anyone how the lift had decided, and Mrs Adeyemi only said that a promise kept in ink still needs a hand to hold it steady.