Close-up of the word Promise in thin black script lettering tattooed along a finger, with a gold ring on the next finger and red nail polish.

Promise script on a finger

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

The image shows the word Promise written in a flowing, cursive script across the length of a finger. The linework is thin and even, and the ink is solid black with no colour. A gold ring sits on the adjacent finger, and the nail is painted red, against a textured light blue fabric background.

Lettering Fine line Hand Promise Script Word Lettering Ring Nail polish

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The letter had been folded so many times that its creases had gone soft as cloth, and still Maud Tregear kept it in the pocket of her oilskin, where the wet could not reach it.

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Her brother Tom had sailed on the Mary Jane the spring the herring failed, promising in his careless way that he would be home before the nets needed mending. He wrote once. The word at the foot of that page was the only one she believed: Promise, in his slanting hand, the tail of the P curling back under the rest like a rope left to dry.

Each evening she walked the harbour wall out to the bell buoy and counted the boats coming in. Old Silas at the chandlery said the sea kept what it liked and gave back only what pleased it. Maud said nothing to him. She had a tin of ink and a bent nib, and every night she wrote the word again on the margin of the tide tables, copying his letters until her fingers knew their shape.

In November the Mary Jane came in low on the water with a torn sail and four men aboard. Tom was not among them. A boy from the far boats climbed onto the quay and held out a tin, and inside it, dry and folded small, was a scrap of tide table with her word on it, and beneath her word, in his hand, a line that said only: I kept it. Maud read it twice, slid the tin into her pocket beside the letter, and went down the steps to where the tide was turning.