Two very elderly sisters live alone in a walled house. One day, the king walks by and hears the sisters singing. Believing them to be young, he urges one of the sisters to stick her finger through a crack in the wall. He sucks and bites her finger, and invites the woman to meet him at the castle that night so that they can have sex. The sister pins her loose skin up so that the king will not know that she is old, and they sleep together that night. However, the sister wants the king to admire her for who she really is, so she unpins her skin, revealing her old age. Disgusted, the king throws her out the window of the castle, where her skin gets caught and tangled in the branches of a tree. A group of fairies pass by and magically transform her into a young woman again, and she falls out of the tree. The second sister goes out to look for her, and at first doesn't recognize her in her new body. The second sister is dismayed at the transformation, and tells her sister that she feels left behind. The second sister pays a barber to remove her extra skin, but instead of becoming young, she is merely bones and muscle with no skin, and spends the rest of her days in great sadness. The first sister, missing her old skin, hunted down the fairies and demanded her skin back, but they refused. She spends the rest of her life searching for her old skin, and when she dies, she does not decompose but rather remains hard and intact forever.