Black typewriter-style lettering reading Promise tattooed along a finger, a lettering design on the hand.

Promise lettering tattoo on a finger

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a hand with the word Promise tattooed in black, typewriter-style capital and lowercase letters running along the side of one finger. The lettering is crisp and evenly weighted, and a silver ring sits on the neighbouring finger. The background is softly out of focus in warm, muted tones, keeping attention on the tattoo.

Lettering Hand Promise Word Lettering Ring

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last bus had already gone from the top of Pitt Street when Dolly Brennan tapped on my shop window with a ten pence piece. I was still under the counter with a screwdriver between my teeth, and the Imperial on the bench had a sticky P that dropped every third stroke. She wanted it fixed by morning. Her son was catching the early train to Hull, and she had typed him a note she would not let anyone else read.

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I had no business keeping the shop open past ten, but I cleaned the type bars with methylated spirit while she waited. Rain ran down the glass in long grey lines, and the streetlamp outside turned everything the colour of weak tea. She stood at the bench in her gloves and watched my hands. "He'll read it on the platform," she said. "Make sure the capitals sit straight. He's particular."

I freed the P, cut a fresh ribbon and let her test the machine. She typed one word over and over on a scrap of carbon paper: Promise, then Promise again, each strike the same weight as the last. Nothing from these old machines comes out quite the same twice, but she was determined it would. When I asked what the promise was, she tore the sheet free, folded it into her glove and paid me in coins that were still warm from her pocket.

Three weeks later a postcard arrived with a picture of a harbour on the front and no return address. Inside, in the same square capitals, it said only that the letter had held. I pinned it above the bench beside the Imperial, where it still hangs, and I have never once had to adjust that key since.