Black script tattoo reading Who Says Dreams Have To Stay Just Dreams on the top of a foot, with grey bubbles and a shell.

Script quote with bubbles and shell on a foot

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is a line of black script lettering across the top of a bare foot, reading Who Says Dreams Have To Stay Just Dreams over two lines. Grey bubbles and a grey shell outline sit among the words. The ink is black and grey with clean, even linework, and the photo is taken against a white cloth with the toes visible at the right.

Lettering Other Quote Script Bubble Shell Foot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every evening the Mab came through Stanhope Lock with her hold full of coal, and every evening Tilly Brask sat on the cabin roof with a grey shell pressed to one ear. Her father said the sea was forty miles off and she would never hear it from a canal. Tilly said the sea was in the shell whether he liked it or not, and went on listening.

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The lock keeper's wife, Ada Pell, had dredged that shell from the silt below the weir years back. She told Tilly the old tale: blow into the river's bottom through a hollow reed, and the bubbles that rise will carry you wherever the water goes. Tilly took this as fact. She went down to the weir at first light with a jam jar and a length of cane.

Three mornings she knelt on the wet stone blowing into the murk while the herons watched her. On the fourth a bubble climbed out of the green, then another, then a dozen, sliding up past her knuckles as if they had somewhere to be. Something knocked from below, and a boy's voice asked who was making all that noise. It was Ada's nephew Sam, who had run off to sea at fifteen and come home with nothing but a salt-stiffened cap. "Who says dreams have to stay just dreams?" Tilly said, and held out the jar.

That autumn they took the Mab south with Sam at the tiller. Her father never forgave the shell, but he kept the bubbles in a jar on the stove for luck, and the coal reached the estuary on time. Somewhere past Gainsborough the water turned salt, and Tilly swore the shell gave a small sigh against her ear.