Black and grey photograph of the word Promise in a typewriter-style font tattooed along the side of a finger, with a heart-shaped ring on the neighbouring finger.

Promise lettering along a finger

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

The image shows the word Promise tattooed in capital and lowercase letters running diagonally along the side of a finger, set in a typewriter-style font. The thin, even black lines are crisp and the letters are filled solid, with soft grey shading on the skin around them. The background is dark and softly out of focus, and a heart-shaped ring sits on the finger below the tattoo.

Lettering Hand Promise Word Ring Heart

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You sit at the typewriter in the customs hut at Coldharbour Bridge, the Remington with its sticky e, while a queue of lorries breathes diesel through the open door. The woman who comes in at four o'clock has rain on her coat and a folded sheet in her gloved hand. She asks, in careful English, whether you can type something for her. Her brother is on the far bank, she says, and the post has stopped.

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She dictates slowly, watching your fingers rather than your face. Tell him I will come when the river drops. You type it, the keys striking hard enough to lift the carbon. When she asks you to read it back, you do, and at the end she says one word by itself and waits. You type it in capitals, then lowercase underneath, the way the old manual taught you, and the last letter catches on its arm. You have to work it free with the tip of a pencil while she counts under her breath.

Inspector Haddon comes in stamping his boots and asks what the delay is. You fold the sheet into the consignment folder beneath the stamped permits and tell him it is nothing, only a note about a lost parcel. He does not look twice. The bridge gate lifts at dusk and she walks through with the folder held flat against her chest like a hymnbook.

Eleven months later a postcard arrives at the hut, addressed to the typist with the sticky e. There is a picture of a river in spate and no signature. Across the bottom, in pencil, someone has written the word again, and the e has been pressed so hard the card has torn.