Black script lettering reading promise tattooed along the side of a raised index finger, shown against a blurred dark background.

Promise lettering on an index finger

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A hand is raised with the index finger angled towards the camera, and the word promise is written in flowing black script along the finger. The lettering has smooth, consistent linework with some shading in the strokes. The ink is a single dark tone, and the blurred blue and dark background keeps the focus on the finger.

Lettering Hand Promise Word Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ink had blurred in the Bay of Biscay, so Nell went over the letters again with a sail needle dipped in soot, holding her hand close to the lamp so the wobble of the deck wouldn't ruin the loops. Below her the Clementine groaned as she rolled, and somewhere forward the cook was shouting for someone to fetch oil before the galley fire went out. She finished the last e, blew on it, and tucked the hand under her oilskin before anyone could ask what she was doing.

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Davy had made his promise on the quay at Liverpool, two fingers crossed behind his back the way he had done since he was six. He would send half his wages home each month. He would be back before the herring came in. Their mother had listened with her arms folded and said nothing, because she knew that a promise spoken on a windy quay was worth about as much as the spray. So Nell had taken the needle from her sewing box that night and written the one word that mattered on her own finger, where no sea could wash it out without her noticing.

Davy came up from the hold at the change of watch, tar to his elbows, and found her leaning against the capstan. He saw the finger before she could hide it and read it slowly, lips moving. For a long moment he said nothing, and the wind filled the sails above them with a sound like someone breathing out.

Then he pulled a stub of pencil from behind his ear and held out his own hand, palm up. Nell laughed and wrote his name across it, and he grinned as though he had won something. Neither of them mentioned that the ink would fade within a year, or that promises were not the sort of thing a person could keep by writing them down.