Two people seen from behind, each with a black handwritten script tattoo reading "awake my soul" on the shoulder.

Matching "awake my soul" script on shoulders

Lettering · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

Two people stand back to camera, each showing a matching black script tattoo reading "awake my soul" across the upper back near the shoulder. The linework is thin and handwritten in style, with even ink and no shading. The image is in warm, natural tones, with a pale sketch of figures on paper blurred in the background.

Lettering Fine line Shoulder Script Word Matching

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The priest at Harrowmere would not write the words down, so the twins did it themselves, one on each other's shoulder with a sharpened goose quill and ink thinned with rainwater. Awake my soul, the old lullaby said, and the sleeping king of Lessary would stir. Nobody had seen him open his eyes in forty winters, but the cooks still left his bread warm on the sill each morning.

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Maud was the careful one. She blotted every stroke and counted the letters twice, because her sister Ila had once written the ink backwards and a whole week of gulls had gone quiet over the castle. Ila hummed while she worked, low and off-key, and Maud pretended not to hear the tune slip into a second verse their grandmother had never taught them.

On the night the palace bells failed, they climbed the north tower with a lamp and a jar of ink. The king was not in his bed. He stood at the parapet in his nightshirt, looking at the two girls as though he had been waiting a long time for someone to climb up and ask him to come down.

"You have the words wrong," he said kindly. "Read them again." Maud looked at the letters on her sister's shoulder, then at her own in the lamp glass, and understood that the phrase had never been a spell for a king at all. It was a thing you said to whoever was keeping watch with you. Ila laughed and said the bells would ring by morning, and for once Maud believed her.