Black ink script quote with a small leaf sprig and a circular Gallifreyan-style design on the forearm.

Quote script and circular design on forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A forearm carries a line of cursive script reading "We're all stories in the end. Just make it a good one, eh?" with the attribution "The Doctor" beneath, alongside a small leaf sprig at the upper left. A large circular design of thin geometric lines and loops sits at the right of the arm, and the whole piece is in black ink with fine, even linework. The photograph is taken from above against a light wooden surface, with the forearm filling most of the frame.

Lettering Geometric Forearm Quote Script Leaf Sprig

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you lot, and mind the brazier, because the ash gets into the honey cakes and nobody wants grit in their teeth at the good bit. You want the one about the stonecutter's daughter and the wheel? Then hush, and I'll start where she started, which was halfway through an argument with her father about a sprig of olive.

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Her father cut seals for the magistrates of Sigma-on-the-Hill, small stone wheels with loops and hooks that no clerk could read aloud. Each loop held a word, he said, and a word held a man's name, so a seal was a promise you could carry in your fist. Lira thought promises were heavy things to hand a child. She pressed a green sprig into the wet clay of the workshop floor while he wasn't looking, and the leaf came out of it so neatly that he swore at her for wasting good clay and then sat down to look.

That was the morning the traveller came in out of the rain, a grey man with a coat full of pockets and a voice like a door that needed oil. He watched her cut the next wheel for an hour without saying a word. Then he leaned over her shoulder and said, "We're all stories in the end, child. Just make it a good one, eh?" She told him to mind his own ink. He laughed so hard he had to sit down on the step.

She finished the seal that night, a wheel with the olive leaf at its heart and loops winding round it like a river that had decided to turn back. The magistrate pressed it into wax on a letter that bore her name, and the wax took every curl of it. The letter is still in a box in the old hall, if you care to go and look. Nobody has ever managed to read the whole of it, mind. Which, I always say, is the sign of a good one.