Hand-drawn pencil sketch of the words Once upon a time in ornate script with swirling flourishes, a lettering design for a tattoo.

Once upon a time lettering sketch

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows the phrase Once upon a time with ornate, looping letters on cream paper. Thin, sketchy outlines with some shading give the letters depth, and curling flourishes extend around the words. The image is black and grey, with the sketch filling most of the frame.

Lettering Lettering Script Flourish Swirl Sketch

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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

No, sit down, the windfalls will keep another hour. Pass me that jug, my throat has been dry since the harvest supper. You want the proper beginning, I suppose. Every teller in the county opens the same way, as if the words belonged to us. Very well. Once upon a time, in a hot August much like this one, there was a grafter called Tobias Quill who kept forty trees at the top of Harrow Lane.

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Tobias had a sour temper and a steady hand. Every graft he wrote the variety on a strip of lead and nailed it to the bark, and he could never leave a capital letter plain. His mother taught him copperplate in a kitchen that smelled of quince, and he kept the loops and tails long after she was gone. The old men said the trees listened to names. The youngest tree in the orchard, a crooked russet nobody wanted, refused to fruit for six summers, and Tobias went to it each evening with his knife and a fresh strip of lead.

One night a girl from the lower farm came up the lane carrying a basket of her own. She was called Ada Marl and said the russet had been planted the year she was born, by her father, who had died in the spring. She asked to see the lead strip. Tobias had never read it. It was worn so thin that only the swirls remained, and Ada traced them with one finger and said, very quietly, that the letters spelled her name. He took his knife and scraped the old lead clean.

He wrote her name across the strip in the old looping hand, and under the tree he said the words his mother used to say at bedtime. The russet dropped its first apple before he reached the gate. Every fruit that autumn bore a dent on one side, as if a thumb had pressed there to mark a page. Tobias never wrote a second name in that orchard. A tree that answers once, he said, has told you all it means to. Pass me that last windfall, the one with the dent in it. That is the story, and now you have heard it, which is the only way a story is ever kept.