Pencil sketch of an open hand with the words love, provoke, direction, promise and good luck placed above the fingers as a finger tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pencil sketch of a hand with finger words

Hand · Black and grey · Flash

A graphite pencil drawing of an open right hand, shown palm down, with fine shading on the fingers and knuckles. Single words are lettered in a handwritten style above and beside the fingers: love, PROVOKE, DIRECTION, Promise and Good Luck. The soft grey background has a vignetted, aged paper look, and the image is in black and grey tones only.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have the tiller under your arm and the rain coming sideways off the Nene when the lock keeper shouts that the gates are foul. Your father wrote the five words on the back of a ledger page the winter he bought the Dorothy Anne, and you copied them onto your own fingers at fourteen with a blue biro because you kept forgetting. Love, provoke, direction, promise, good luck. Thumb to pinkie, the order of the trade.

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Nobody warned you a boat could argue. The Dorothy Anne wants to go wherever the current pushes her, and you spend the morning teaching her otherwise, one small nudge of the rudder at a time. Provoke is the word for that, your father said. You don't fight the water. You irritate it into agreeing with you.

By evening the lock is clear and the towpath is empty except for a heron standing like a clerk waiting for a bus. Halloran from the boatyard, who owes your father forty pounds and has never once paid it, leans on the rail and asks why you still keep the words written out when you could just remember them. You hold up your hand and turn it palm down so he can read them. Promise, you tell him, is the one you can't rub off. He laughs, then stops laughing, because he has seen the ink go soft at the knuckles.

You tie up at the mooring as the lamp on the bow comes on, and the blue on your fingers catches the light. Direction is simple enough tonight. Good luck, you think, is what you say to the water before you leave it alone. The rain has stopped, and the Dorothy Anne rocks gently against the bank, finally agreeing with you.

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