Black lettering tattoo of the phrase What's Past is Prologue with a small arrow beneath it, on the inner forearm, in a lettering style.

Quote and arrow on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo reads "What's Past is...Prologue" in black ink, with the words "Prologue" set in a joined script and the rest in a upright sans-serif style. A thin black arrow with a small double barb sits below the text, pointing right. The ink is solid black with no shading or colour, and the photo is taken close up on a forearm resting on a light fleece blanket.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dearest Hester,

Keep reading

The Wardens of the Salt Gate have finally let me into the Vault of Ledgers, though only on condition that I copy nothing the Queen has ordered burned. I have spent three days among the drowned pages. Every chronicle in Merrow begins with a proclamation and ends with a flood, a fire or a sulking heir, and I had begun to think the kingdom had no interest in anything that happened after the crown was set.

Yesterday I found the ledger of the Rowan years, bound in eel-skin and stiff with brine. The last entry is a tally of barley sent north to a village called Ashcombe, which no map in the palace still shows. Beneath it someone had drawn a small arrow in iron-gall ink, pointing east past the margin, and under the arrow a clerk had written: What's past is prologue. Nothing followed on the page. I sat with that arrow for an hour, thinking of all the names I was taught to recite as if they were the story itself.

Then I understood what the old clerk meant. The grand histories are only the front matter. What matters is the account kept by people who never expected to be read, and that is the book we are about to start. I have asked the Warden for a fresh quire and a pot of black ink, and I mean to write the first line tonight.

Tell Father the bread is good here and I am not being eaten by the gulls. I will send the opening page once the ink is dry.

Your loving sister, Maud

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