Two hands with the word promise in black script tattooed along the side of a finger, with one finger raised in front.

Promise script tattoos on two fingers

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Two hands are shown close up, each with the word promise written in thin, cursive script running along the side of a finger. The linework is fine and dark, appearing black or dark grey against the skin. The composition is tightly framed on the fingers, with a blurred dark background and one nail painted purple.

Lettering Hand Promise Script Word Finger Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mairi came down the slip with the ink jar wrapped in her apron, the one she used for marking nets, and found Tam already sitting on the bollard with his two hands held out in front of him like a pair of cod on a slab. The boats had gone out at four. Their mothers had told them both to stay put until the tide turned, and neither of them had.

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"You'll not put it on my thumb," he said. "Thumbs are for hitching."

"Then you'll take the finger, same as me."

The old story in Gourlay said that a promise kept on the skin could not be broken without the skin telling on you. Nobody in the town had ever tested it, because nobody had made a promise worth the ink. Mairi dipped a sewing pin bound with thread and pricked the word along the first finger of his left hand, letter by letter, while Tam counted gulls and swore at each sting. She did his right hand after, then he did hers, deep and sloppy, the way a boy writes on a wet wall.

The boats came back in the dark with the lamps low. Tam's father had gone down with the Mary Ann in the squall off the Skerry, and the town waited on the quay to see who would walk up the slip. Tam was not in the crowd. Mairi found him at the end of the pier, holding his hand up to the lantern. The word had blurred but it was still there. "I kept it," he said. "I'm the one who came back, so I'm the one who waits." She looked at her own finger, at the wobbly letters he had made, and understood that they had never been promising to come home. They had been promising to keep watching the water for whoever was still out there.