Black lettering reading 'A dream is a wish your heart makes' across the top of a foot, with a blue glass slipper tattoo below the text.

Quote and glass slipper on a foot

Lettering · Other · Mixed · Photo

A photograph of a tattoo on the top of a foot, with the words 'A dream is a wish your heart makes' set in black lettering across three lines. The letters have a hand-drawn, slightly uneven outline with dotted shading around them. Below the text sits a small blue glass slipper with grey shading and highlights, set against pale fabric.

Lettering Other Quote Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Calliope sailed from Liverpool with four hundred steerage passengers and one cobbler, which was me. By the third day Mrs Haddow's lamp needed resoling, and Mr Pym's boots had split along the welt before we cleared the Mersey bar. I worked in the forward locker with my lapstone bolted to the planking and a tin of tacks that rattled every time the bow dropped into a trough.

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On the nineteenth day a girl came down the ladder carrying one shoe and one slipper. The slipper was glass, blue as the water gets over sand off Madeira, and no heavier than a pear. She said her mother had bought the pair from a stall in Bootle for a wedding that never happened. She wanted the heel bound so it would stand on the deck without cracking. I told her glass doesn't mend. She said that was exactly why she had come to me, since I was the only man aboard who had ever told her no straight.

I didn't try. I set the slipper on the lapstone in the lamplight, tore a strip from an old sail-cloth, and wrote out what her mother used to say, that a dream is a wish your heart makes. I pinned it to the locker beam. By the time we raised the Azores she had copied the words into her own book in pencil, three lines, the letters pressed hard enough to dent the page.

We made Halifax in April. She went ashore barefoot with the slipper held by its heel, and I never learned whether she wore it or only carried it home. The sail-cloth is still tacked above my bench. The words have gone soft with damp, but I can read every one, and I still mend boots for people who tell me what they cannot afford.