Pencil drawing of a traditional-style dagger with an ornate hilt and the word Rumplestiltskin on the blade, with banners reading All magic comes with a price, shown as a tattoo design.

Dagger with banner reading All magic comes with a price

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a dagger with a tall, flame-like blade engraved with the word Rumplestiltskin and an ornate cross guard. Three ribbon banners wrap around the hilt, reading All magic comes with a price. The drawing uses soft grey shading and clean outlines on a plain cream background.

Traditional Dagger Banner Lettering Quote Sword Ribbon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pull your collars up and sit on the crates under the awning, the lot of you, because the rain has come off the river and means to stay until dinner. Good. Mab Tennant keeps a knife in a biscuit tin under her stall, and if you buy a bag of pears she'll show it to you. The blade is long and wavering like a candle flame, and down its length someone has cut a name in old black letters. Rumplestiltskin, it says, and you'll not be sure whether to laugh.

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Her grandfather ground edges on this corner when the market was only canvas and mud. One wet Saturday a thin woman came with a broken bread knife and a voice like a shut door. She wanted the blade sharp enough to cut a promise. He asked why, and she told him about her sister, who had sold a first child to a grey little man for a cradle of gold, then tricked him out of the bargain by guessing his name. The grinder laughed and said he would sharpen her knife for nothing if she gave him the same trick. She would not. So he cut the name into the steel himself, the one she had spoken, and handed the knife back with its edge gleaming.

'That's the trouble, see,' Mab says, wiping her hands on her apron. 'The name was never the price. Every soul who came asking for that knife paid with something else, a tooth, a year, a winter's sleep. Grandad painted it on his board so nobody could say they hadn't been warned. All magic comes with a price.'

The boy who bought the knife last spring asked what it would cost him. Mab's grandfather told him the truth, and the boy paid it gladly, because he was nine and thought a whistle was a small thing to give up. He has never whistled since. Rain drums on the awning and the gutters run over the stones. Mind the bag of pears, now. The one with the bruise is the sweetest, and it's the cheapest thing on this whole market.