Colour lettering tattoo reading Mischief Managed in a circle, with a purple smoke trail, green and yellow stars and a wand on an arm.

Mischief Managed lettering with purple smoke trail and wand

Lettering · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A purple smoky trail winds across the skin and loops into a circle of dark blue lettering that reads Mischief Managed. Small green and yellow stars sit around the design, and a brown wand with a yellow tip extends from the right-hand end of the trail. The shading on the smoke is soft and speckled, while the lettering has crisp, clean outlines.

Lettering Forearm Lettering Smoke Trail Star Wand Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Little Wenning had ever seen Aunt Hester's wand, because she kept it in a tea caddy under the stairs, beside the mouse traps. Her nephew Tobias found it the wet week the chimney smoked, and he carried it out to the back garden to see whether it would do anything. For an hour it did nothing at all. Then he gave it a flick at the washing line, and a purple trail poured from the tip, thick as wool, and wound itself round the pegs like a cat finding a warm spot.

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He tried to put it back. The trail would not let go of the wand. It coiled up through the air and sat there, speckling everything with little stars that glowed green and yellow and then blinked out, one by one, like candles in a draughty church. The sheets flapped. A blackbird came to look and thought better of it.

Hester came out with the kettle and found him on the step with a ribbon of smoke looped into a perfect ring, and inside the ring, in blue letters that refused to sit still, were the words MISCHIEF and MANAGED. The letters were in her handwriting. She had written them on the inside of the caddy lid forty years before, as a joke nobody had ever explained to her.

"You were meant to leave that alone," she said. Then she sighed, and then she laughed, because the washing had gone up the chimney and the chimney had stopped smoking. By Tuesday the purple was fading from the garden, but the ring stayed put, and the kettle had started whistling a tune she did not know.