Close-up photograph of the word promise in thin white script tattooed along the side of a finger, shown in a lettering style.

Promise written in script along a finger

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A close-up of a single finger with the word promise written in a looping, cursive script that runs along its length. The ink is pale, reading as white or light against the skin, and the linework is fine and even. The finger fills the frame diagonally over a light, soft-focus background with some bokeh lights in the lower area.

Lettering Other Promise Word Script

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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

Sit down, sit down, the 4.10 is forty minutes late and it won't be hurrying for us. You want the true version or the one they print in the Gazette? Good. Then I'll give you the true one and you can pay me in tea. The station at Hollin Cross was a grey box then, with one bench and a clock that ran fast on purpose, and it was there that Mrs Vera Pell came every Thursday with a tin of boiled sweets and a pencil in her hair.

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Her boy, Tom Arkwright, signed on as a fireman on the Hollin line, and on the platform in March 1919 he promised he would be on the 6.15 back from Doncaster before the frost. He never was. Vera did not cry about it, not in front of anyone. She went to Mr Lowther the jeweller in Market Street and asked for a white ink that would sit under the skin and show through the years like breath on cold glass. He said he had nothing of the kind. She said she would wait until he found it.

It took him a month. He mixed powdered chalk with the palest of his gold-leaf size and pricked the letters in with a needle no thicker than a hair. When she held out her finger across his counter, he wrote the word in a looping hand, promise, running the length of it so she could read it every time she reached for her ticket. Ink like that does not hold well. By the next winter it had gone the colour of old lace.

Tom came back in 1921 on the 6.15, thinner and quieter, and found her on the bench with the tin of sweets. She showed him her finger. He read it aloud, slowly, the way you read a timetable you no longer trust. Then he sat down beside her, and the clock went on running fast, and neither of them said a word about the years in between. There, that's the 4.10 now, look at it come round the bend. Mind the step.