Black lettering tattoo reading I'm the hero of this story, I don't need to be saved, across the upper back of a person lying face down on a bed.

Two-line quote tattoo across upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A person lies face down on grey bedding with long dark hair falling over one shoulder, and one hand is visible near the head. A two-line quote is tattooed across the upper back in black ink, set in a typewriter-style serif font. The warm, soft light and overhead angle give the photograph a muted, vintage tone.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mae Tolliver was twelve when the Gilded Fair pitched its tents on the common below Harrowby, and she was the only child in the village who did not want to be carried off by it. The showman, Mr Sallow, had a voice like wet gravel and a wagon painted with stars, and he promised every child a ride on a carousel that would take them to the far side of the moon. Her mother wept at the gate. Her brother climbed into the wagon before anyone could stop him.

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Mae went after him with a bread knife in her apron and the lantern her grandfather had left her. The wagon had no door, only a painted curtain, and behind it the fair kept its prizes in glass jars: children asleep and tiny, like pressed flowers. The Tinker's Maid, who ran the ticket booth, had given up trying to frighten her. "Everyone who comes here wants a rescuer," she said, sweeping the boards. "Not one has come to rescue herself."

Mae found her brother in the third jar, no bigger than a thimble, and she did not weep. She set the lantern down and told the story aloud, the way her grandfather used to tell it, with the wrong turns and the honest bargains, until the stars on the wagon began to go out one by one. At the last line she was standing on the moon, which turned out to be only a painted hoop, and the jars cracked open like eggs.

Her brother walked out holding her hand, blinking at the morning. Mae never said who had saved them. When people asked, she only shrugged and said she had been the hero of that story, and that she had never needed anyone to come and fetch her.

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