Black fine line script tattoo reading Once upon a time, with small swirl flourishes, on a forearm.

Once upon a time script on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a forearm with the words Once upon a time... written in black script, with an ellipsis at the end. Small swirls and dotted flourishes decorate the capital O and the letters between the words. The ink is a single dark tone on lightly haired skin, and the words run diagonally across the arm.

Lettering Fine line Forearm Script Lettering Swirl Flourish

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Shift up, the pair of you, and keep your hands out of the chip paper, because the lamplighter has gone past twice and the gulls have given up on us. You want the true one or the one the bus drivers tell? Right. Listen close, for I only tell it the once a night, and tonight the night is nearly spent.

Keep reading

Once upon a time there was a ferryman's daughter called Hetty Marsh who lived on the Sheffield side of the river, where the water ran black under the iron bridges. Every evening she rowed a lantern out to the middle and called the names of the drowned boys, and every evening one of them answered her from under the weir. Nobody believed a word of it, which is how Hetty liked things, until the night her own brother went missing in the fog and the answering voice began calling hers.

Now the children always ask me what she did next, and I always tell them the same thing. The tale stops there on purpose. Three dots, see, one after another, like stepping stones across a beck. Whatever came after Hetty went into the water is for you to carry home and decide. Some nights I think she climbed out. Some nights I think she rowed on and never came back to shore at all.

A boy I knew once sat exactly where you're sitting and traced those dots on the railing with his finger until his mother came to fetch him. He never did say which ending he chose. The lamp went out behind us, and when I looked round there was only the swirl of his scarf going up the steps, and the faint dotted line of his finger still shining on the wet iron.