Black ink tattoo of two hands linking little fingers in a pinky promise, framed by sprigs and small stars, on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pinky promise hands with sprigs and stars

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two hands link their little fingers at the centre of the design, with dark cuffs at the wrists and a sprig of leaves curving around each side. Small five-point stars sit above and below the hands. The tattoo is done in black ink only, with bold outlines and solid black fills on the cuffs and leaves, and the skin tone of the hands is left unshaded.

Botanical Traditional Forearm Hand Sprig Leaves Star Cuff Wreath

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hettie had her little finger hooked around Marnie's on the wall at the bottom of Coldharbour Lane, the rosemary hedge going brown at the tips where the frost had caught it. "Same stars," Marnie said, because that was the rule. Whatever sky either of them stood under at ten o'clock, they would look up, count the bright ones over the church tower, and know the other was counting too. Hettie thought it a silly rule and agreed to it anyway, the way you agree to things when you are nine and your hand is cold.

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Years went by the way they do. Hettie took the train to Leeds for a clerk's post, then further, to lodgings on Mill Street with a landlady who disapproved of visitors. Marnie stayed in the village, married the chandler's boy, and took over the bakery when her mother's hands gave out. Every December a letter came with a sprig of rosemary pressed flat between two pieces of card and a date pencilled on the back. Hettie kept them in a biscuit tin under the bed. On each of those nights she went out to the yard in her coat, buttoned to the chin, and counted until her eyes watered.

This year the envelope held no sprig. Inside was a page torn from an old almanac, a star chart with a ring of pencil marks around the Plough, and a note in Marnie's careless slant: "Cloud since Tuesday. You'll have to count for both of us." Hettie read it on the step, then went back in for the tin and walked to the station with it under her arm.

The train was late. She stood on the platform, looking up through the smoke at a gap in the sky where three stars showed. She counted them twice. Then she took the pencil from her coat, wrote "Three" on the back of Marnie's note, and posted it in the box by the ticket office before the train came in.