Pencil drawing of a traditional-style dagger with the name Rumplestiltskin on the blade and a banner reading All Magic Comes With a Price, drawn as a tattoo design.

Dagger and banner reading All Magic Comes With a Price

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a wavy-bladed dagger with the word Rumplestiltskin written down the blade in blackletter-style lettering, with ornamental detail near the hilt. Three ribbon banners wrap around the grip, reading All Magic, Comes With, and A Price. The drawing uses soft grey shading and hatching on white paper, with a centred composition.

Traditional Lettering Dagger Banner Lettering Blade

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

At ten past three the ward lights dropped to their night setting, and Dilys Harker counted the controlled drugs twice, the way her mother had taught her to count stitches. Bed twelve's buzzer went again. Mr Aske had been asking for someone called Rumple all night, and she had stopped trying to work out whether he meant a grandson or a dog.

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When she reached him he was sitting up, his hands folded on the blanket like a man waiting for a bus. "You're the one who does the sums," he said. "Mine's a simple one." He told her his grandfather had carried a pocket knife with a wavy blade, the sort a sailor keeps for rope, and had sworn that every favour came with a sliver of something you could never get back. "Lost my sister's name to it," he said. "Took me till Tuesday to notice."

Dilys sat on the plastic chair and asked what the favour had been. He wouldn't say. He asked for a biscuit instead, and she fetched custard creams from the nurses' drawer, feeling foolish and fond. He ate one slowly, looking up at the ceiling tiles as if he could read something written there.

At handover she wrote in the notes: settled, requested biscuit, asked for Rumple, no distress. Then, because it seemed the honest thing, she added the sister's name he had finally given her, and drew one neat line through it so that nobody on the morning shift could read it.