Black and grey pencil sketch design of two hands linking little fingers, with a banner scroll on each wrist, suited to a hand or wrist placement.

Pinky promise hands with wrist banners

Hand · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil sketch shows two hands linked by their little fingers in a pinky promise. Each wrist has a ribbon banner with lettering, one reading "I said I'd never let you go" and the other "And I never did". The shading is soft and graphic, with white paper left open around the hands and banners, and the composition is centred on the linked fingers.

Hand Hand Banner Lettering Promise

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The platform at Harrow Cross has one bench, one lamp and a stationmaster who pretends not to watch, and you stand there with your little finger hooked through Dennis Ashby's as if the knuckle might set crooked if you let go. He is leaving on the 6.10 for the Kent coalfield, where the pay is better and his father has not yet written to say he will stop speaking to him. You have told him twice already that the promise is childish. He has told you twice that childish promises are the only kind a man can keep.

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Your mother says a girl from the chapel choir should not be seen with a miner's boy, and your father says nothing, which is worse. For three winters you have walked the lane between the laundry and the mill with his letters folded in your apron pocket, each one ending with the same line, that he has not forgotten the bargain made behind the Co-op. You answer them at the kitchen table after the wireless has gone quiet, writing in pencil because the ink is kept for the accounts.

The whistle goes. He pulls, you pull, and the fingers part at the last joint like a wishbone. Then he is at the carriage door with his cap in his hand, and you understand he has meant something else all along: not that he would stay on the platform, but that he would not let go of you in his head. You walk home the long way past the gasworks, humming the hymn you were meant to sing on Sunday, and on the back step there is a parcel in brown paper addressed in his hand. Inside is a pencil drawing of two hands linked at the little fingers, and a strip of cloth for your wrist with his words stitched along it.