Close-up of a black script tattoo reading Once upon a time with a small red heart above it on the inner forearm.

Once upon a time script with red heart

Lettering · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows the phrase Once upon a time followed by an ellipsis, written in a loose, handwritten black script that runs diagonally up the forearm. A small solid red heart sits above the end of the lettering. The skin is lit evenly against a plain grey wall, with a striped navy sleeve at the edge of the frame.

Lettering Fine line Forearm Script Quote Heart

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

At the river town of Ketheron, the scribe Ilas Morrow was paid in barley to mark the lintels of new houses. He wrote the same opening on every one in soot ink: Once upon a time, and then three dots and nothing more. Beside the dots he pressed a small red heart, made from crushed madder root, because his mother had told him a story should have a warm place to begin.

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Nobody in Ketheron could say how many doors he had marked before he grew too old to climb the ladders. The children learned their letters from those lintels. They would stand in the lane and sound out the first words, then stop at the dots, because the dots asked them a question they could not yet answer. Their grandmothers said the ending was kept in the river, and that anyone who wanted it had only to walk down to the water at dusk and wait.

A ferryman's daughter called Brisa came to Ilas one wet autumn, after her father's boat had gone missing in the reeds. She asked him whether the dots meant the story was lost. He gave her his pen and said the lintels had never been finished by the people who painted them. She sat on the step of his workshop for most of a day with the pen in her fist, then wrote a single line beneath the dots: and the ferryman came home for supper.

That evening the ferryman did come home, muddy to the knees and cross about his oars. Ilas went out with his bucket the next morning to whitewash the lane, and he left Brisa's line standing in the sun, its ink still dark, the red heart beside it turned gold where the light fell.