Pale lettering reading wit beyond measure runs across the upper back near the shoulder blade, in a lettering style.

White lettering across upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

Pale lettering reading "wit beyond measure" runs diagonally across the upper back near the shoulder blade, against a light skin tone. The letters look raised and whitish rather than black, so this may be white ink or a scar-style piece, with a lowercase, handwritten-style typeface. The top edge of a green top sits across the bottom of the frame, and the background is a plain pale wall with a green panel.

Lettering Back Text Word Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have been told since childhood that the Queen of Harrowmere keeps her wit in a glass jar on the high sill of the Lantern Tower, and that no one has ever carried it down. So when the palace clerk Osric Fenwick comes to your door at dusk, smelling of wet ink, and asks whether you are willing to climb, you say yes before he has finished the sentence. He gives you a rope of plaited nettle fibre, a tin of lamp oil, and a folded note in the Queen's own sloping hand: wit beyond measure, it reads, and nothing else.

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The tower stairs are cold and smell of pigeon feathers. Halfway up you find a window open to the marsh, and a boy from the stables sitting on the sill with his boots in the air. He tells you the jar was emptied years ago by a duke who wanted to be the cleverest man in the county, and that the duke has been bowing to a weathervane ever since. You ask him what the Queen wants now. He shrugs and says she wants to be asked, which is not the same thing at all.

At the top the jar sits empty except for a single white feather and a slip of paper, blank on one side. You understand the note now. You take the feather, leave the jar where it stands, and write on the blank side with the lamp oil and a splinter of charcoal: the Queen was never measured, only mislaid. When you descend, the clerk is waiting at the foot of the stairs, and he reads it twice, then laughs until he has to sit down on the cold flags.