We Should Have Known That Sansa Stark Tattoo Totally Spoiled the Game of Thrones Ending

Warning: This story contains spoilers for Game of Thrones.

Sansa Stark, now known after the ending of Game of Thrones as the Queen of the North, became a master political gamesman over eight seasons of onscreen education at the hands of poker-faced manipulators like Queen Cersei, Ramsay Bolton and Littlefinger.

So perhaps it shouldn’t be such a surprise that actress Sophie Turner, who played Sansa, picked up some of her techniques. To wit: back in 2018, Turner got a new tattoo on her arm— of a direwolf, the sigil of House Stark, and a saying: “The pack survives.” When asked about it on James Corden’s show, however, she played it off at the time as “just a moral that I like to live by,” saying: “When I was getting it done, people advised me not to because it looked like I was giving everything away. But I wasn’t! It’s just a quote from last season, but everyone figures that the pack really does survive.” (Sansa voices it at one point in season seven, but it’s also a line that Ned Stark, played by Sean Bean, first says to her sister Arya, played by Maisie Williams, back in season one.)

Now, though, we know that Turner was keeping fans from something of a spoiler for the finale of Thrones all along. The HBO series ended with her brother Bran Stark crowned as King Bran the Broken, Ruler of the Six Kingdoms; her sister Arya is heading to new territories “west of Westeros;” and her other nominal brother Jon Snow (or Aegon Targaryen) is relegated to duties in the Night’s Watch once more. So while the pack may not be together geographically— and sadly they lost little brother Rickon — they did, pretty much, survive.