Two fingers held together, each with the word Promise in black script lettering tattooed along the side, one hand wearing a ring.

Promise script tattooed on two fingers

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Two fingers are placed side by side, each showing the word Promise in flowing, cursive script with a large decorative capital P. The lettering is solid black ink with smooth, even linework and no visible shading. The dark background makes the ink stand out clearly, and the fingers form a loose frame in the centre of the composition.

Lettering Hand Promise Word Script

Find an artist for this

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 sign for the lorry yard had to be lettered before the six o'clock bus, so I was up a stepladder in the drizzle with a sable brush and a tin of black enamel when the two girls came round the corner from the customs shed. They didn't want a shop sign. Their mother had kept a household ledger, they said, every page headed in the same looping hand, and they wanted the P done just like hers, big as a fist, with a curl at the top like a fern uncoiling.

Keep reading

I asked what word. They looked at each other, and the younger one held up two fingers side by side, the way children hold a pair of pennies together. Promise, she said. Not on paper. Somewhere they could see it every day. I had no ink fine enough for skin, so I painted the word on a scrap of board instead, the P first, then the rest tucked along beneath it. The older girl pressed her fingertips against the wet letters to check they were dry. They weren't, quite, and the black came off on her knuckles like soot.

The bus left without them. Three weeks later a letter arrived at the yard, addressed only to the sign-writer on the frontier road, with a photograph folded inside. Two fingers lay edge to edge, the word inked across each one in lines gone properly dark, the capital on the second a little unsteady, as if someone had been working from memory. On the back, in pencil, was written: She kept her half. Now you keep yours.

I pinned the photograph above my bench, beside the brushes. Every morning since, before I touch a sign, I draw one loop of a capital P on a scrap of board and leave it to dry. A promise, I have learned, is mostly the first curl. The rest of the word follows along behind it.