Black ink lettering reading Once Upon A Time with flowing vines and leaves across the inside of a forearm, in a Lettering style.

Once upon a time lettering with vines on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a forearm carrying the words Once Upon A Time in bold black serif lettering, with a decorative swirled O and S. Fine vines with small leaves curl between and around the letters, and the lines look crisp and even. The ink is solid black and grey with no colour, and the text fills the centre of the frame against a blurred warm background.

Lettering Botanical Forearm Lettering Vine Leaves Swirl Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By half ten the rain had found the gap in the awning, and it was dripping onto the box of paperbacks I'd been saving for the Tuesday man. I had a dustpan wedged under the drip when a woman in a green mac stopped at the tray marked free and asked, without looking at me, whether I had any books with the endings missing.

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"Plenty," I said. "Most of them are missing their endings." She laughed, the first real laugh I'd heard all morning, and lifted from her carrier bag a book bound in grey cloth, its spine patched with masking tape. Inside, every story stopped mid-sentence. A princess reached for a door. A fox glanced back over its shoulder. Someone's name was half written before the page simply ran out. In the margins, someone had drawn fine vines with small leaves, curling round the words as if they were trying to keep them from falling off the page.

"My mother kept it under the bed," she said. "She said the endings were the part you had to earn, and she never finished a single one." She asked what I'd charge. I told her nothing, but she pressed a pound coin into my palm anyway, still warm from her pocket, and walked off toward the bus stop with the book tucked under her arm.

That evening I took a pen to the blank back page of my ledger and wrote the first line I could think of, then stopped, the way those stories had stopped. Outside the rain thinned to nothing, and a stripe of low sun lit the wet cobbles gold. I left the sentence open and the lamp on.