Black fine line script reading Once Upon a Time runs across the side of a foot, above a bare sole and turquoise toenail polish.

Once Upon a Time script on a foot

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A foot rests on a dark wooden floor, with a black script phrase reading Once Upon a Time and a trailing ellipsis running diagonally along the side of the foot. The lettering is thin, even and solid black, with smooth flowing curves and no shading. The turquoise toenail polish is the only strong colour, and the soft grey furniture and floor sit blurred in the background.

Lettering Fine line Other Script Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mairead would not finish a story until the fire had burned down to the last ember, and the children of Inish Dubh knew it, so they banked the peat themselves and sat close. Her father had taught her the trick. Start with the words everybody wants, then stop, and let the wind fill the gap.

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The winter the boats stopped coming, the children asked her to finish the one about the drowned bell. She opened her mouth, said the old words, and nothing came after them. There were only the dots, three of them, the way the sea leaves a line of foam on the sand before it goes. She pressed her lips together. "That's where it stops," she said. "Not because I've forgotten, but because nobody on this island has been brave enough to decide what happens next."

Tomas, who was nine and had never been brave about anything, carried an ember from the grate in a cockle shell and walked down to the strand at low tide. He knelt by the wet sand and wrote the ending in the shallows with his finger, letter by letter, while the sea rubbed each one out as fast as he made it. He did not mind. He wrote it again.

By morning the tide had taken the words, but the bell rang once from under the water and the boats came home on the flood. Mairead never told the end herself. She simply began the story again every night, and every night she left the gap for him.