When Mabel gets older she strikes me as someone who would like to get a tattoo (especially after she sees Wendy’s tats and gushes over them for an hour) but can’t ever decide what she wants it of.

It’s not that she has no ideas, she has too many. Monsters and mythical creatures, knotwork designs, inspirational quotes, swirly flower borders surrounding pig faces and full sleeves filled with her favorite characters and creatures. Mostly huge, elaborate colorful designs.

She comes up with one idea after another, drawing out different versions and possible placements for all of them but she just can’t manage to find one she likes better than all the others enough to make it permanent. Instead she has a whole sketchbook filled with possible tattoo designs that she talks about a lot but wonders if she’ll ever actually use.

Eventually she does get some use out of it, though not the kind she was expecting. A friend of hers who works in a tattoo parlor is impressed with her designs and offers her an apprenticeship. She’s between jobs at the time, so she figures, why not? She likes the work anyway, though she sometimes feels a little odd being the only one working there with no ink of her own.

Then one afternoon, a customer comes in asking her to turn an embarrassing birthmark of hers into a bird in flight. Mabel finally knows what she wants.

The next time she and Dipper are skyping with one another, she tells him she finally got the tattoo she’d been talking about for so long. She turns around and pulls the sleeve of her shirt back, revealing a design on her shoulderblade. It’s surprisingly small and colorless–Dipper had been expecting something huge, brightly colored and whimsical.

“It’s Cassiopeia!” Mabel exclaims. “Grunkle Ford said that it’s one of the three constellations used to find north. ‘Cause Polaris is always between Cassiopeia and the Big Dipper! Get it?”

Dipper’s dumbstruck. He doesn’t know what to say. Mabel turns back and grins.

“Though actually I kinda don’t like the Cassiopeia story since she was thrown into the sky as punishment. But the Celts had a better story, they called her Anu and thought she was the Mother of all the Gods, so I think I’m gonna call it Anu even though most people know the Cassiopeia story better…”



Mabel keeps talking, going on about the Celts and ancient China and the stories they told about the stars. And Dipper just smiles, barely listening, looking at his sweet, wonderful sister like she could outshine them all.