# A till receipt is funnier than a fairy

> A giant milk tooth and a tiny till receipt reading 1 TOOTH, 1 COIN, COLLECTED IN THE NIGHT — the first time a child converts part of their own body into money.

August 19, 2026 · https://justog.club/stories/the-tooth-and-the-receipt

One milk tooth, root and all, drawn enormous in cream across the upper chest. Beneath it, tiny and
crooked, a till receipt: `1 TOOTH / 1 COIN / COLLECTED IN THE NIGHT`.

A tooth goes under a pillow. A coin comes back. It's the first time in a person's life that part of
their own body gets converted into money, and nobody involved treats that as strange.

## Why a receipt instead of a drawing of a fairy?

Because the receipt states plainly what's actually happening — an exchange — and that's funnier than
dressing it up.

A fairy illustration asks the reader to go along with a story. A receipt just itemises the trade:
one tooth in, one coin out, collected overnight. Printing the transaction rather than the mythology
around it is the joke, and it also happens to be the more honest version of what the child
experienced, which was going to sleep short a tooth and waking up with money.

## Why is the tooth huge and the receipt tiny?

Because that's the actual proportion of how much either object matters — the tooth is the whole
event, the receipt is paperwork.

Drawing the tooth small and the receipt large would reverse the emphasis and turn the design into a
joke about bureaucracy rather than a joke about a strange trade being treated matter-of-factly. The
root drawn large and visible is what sells it — unmistakably a real tooth that came out of a real
mouth, not a cartoon icon of one. The receipt running along beneath it, barely readable at a glance,
gets exactly the amount of attention paperwork usually gets in a story like this one.

## Who sets the exchange rate?

The household — and everybody who grew up in one remembers what theirs was.

There's no going rate for a tooth; every family lands on its own coin, note, or occasional upgrade
for a particularly stubborn molar, and that number becomes a small piece of family lore on its own.
Printing the actual figure your household used is what makes the receipt specific rather than
generic — a made-up number would read as a joke about tooth fairies in general rather than about
this one.

## Does the child get a say in whether this goes on a shirt?

Eventually, yes — nothing about the tooth or the receipt is licensed from anybody, it's the family's
own record, but the person it's about grows into an opinion about it.

Some children find the receipt joke delighted them at the time and still do years later. Others,
once they're old enough to think about it, would rather the detail of a lost tooth stayed private.
Neither reaction is wrong, [the same way the story behind a scar is the child's to tell or not
tell](/stories/the-scar-and-the-story) — the honest approach is asking once they're old enough
to have a view, not guessing on their behalf either way.

## Does this only work for the first tooth?

No — it works for any tooth, though the first one usually carries the most weight, the way any first
version of an occasion tends to get kept over the ones that follow it.

A household that kept a running tally could print a later tooth just as easily, with the receipt
number updated. What makes any single one worth printing is less about which tooth and more about
whether the exact wording of the receipt still sounds like your family's version of the joke.

## What about households that don't do the tooth-and-coin thing at all?

That's a completely ordinary choice and doesn't need defending against this design.

Some families skip the exchange altogether, mark the tooth some other way, or don't mark it at all.
None of that is a lesser version of childhood — it's simply a different tradition, the same way [a
free gift printed on a cereal box is one specific era's convention rather than a universal
one](/stories/free-gift-inside-flash). This design is for the households where the coin
did appear, not an argument that it should have.

## Does it print well?

Yes — a single large flat shape and a strip of small type is a straightforward two-part print.

The tooth wants one solid colour with no shading inside it; the outline is doing all the work of
reading as a tooth, so the flat cream fill against a dark garment like midnight blue reads cleanly
from a distance. The receipt text is the one part that needs care — set at true receipt size it will
fill in on fabric, so it wants sizing up a touch while staying visibly the smaller of the two
elements, [the kind of scale decision that a handful of flat colours can carry without losing
clarity](/stories/design-across-seven-colours).

## How do I get one made?

Describe the trade at [JustOG](/) — the tooth, the coin, and the exact wording your receipt used.
Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to
order and shipped.

Designs other people have published are in the [shop](/shop).

Nobody has ever asked to see the coin again after it went into a drawer somewhere.