Black lettering tattoo reading promise on a finger, shown in a three-panel photo.

Promise lettering on a finger

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A three-panel collage shows the single word promise tattooed in black lettering along the side of a finger. The top panels show the word from the side and at an angle against a tiled floor, and the bottom panel is a close view with a second hand beside it. The lettering is bold and dark, and the photos are in warm, muted tones with no colour ink.

Lettering Hand Promise Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pull your collars up, the lot of you, because the rain has no manners and the story won't wait for it. Thirty years I've stood by this stall of tin buckets and rope, and the wet has never once stopped a good tale being told. So listen. There were two women who sold eels on Bellgate Market, Nell Ashby and Dora Quiller, and they despised each other the way only neighbours can.

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One November the tanks froze solid, the council cut the water, and a fire took the back of Dora's stall. Nell found her sitting on an upturned crate with soot to the wrists, refusing to cry in front of the gulls. Nell didn't say sorry. She crooked her little finger out and held it up in the drizzle, the way children do when they mean business. "Swear you'll not sell up," she said. "Swear it on this." Dora looked at that bent finger for a long time. Then she hooked her own around it.

They kept to it. Through the price wars, through Dora's wedding and Nell's long winter of coughing, the two pitches stood side by side under one tarpaulin. Nobody ever saw them touch except at that small crooked hook, and neither ever explained it. Folk assumed a feud had turned into a friendship by accident, and let them have it that way.

When Nell died, Dora came down before dawn with the rain coming sideways off the river and found a single word chalked on the slate above the empty pitch, in Nell's looping hand. Nell had written it years back, under a bucket of eels nobody bought. Dora rubbed at the edges, read it twice, and left it where it was. Promise, it said, and nothing more, which was Nell all over.