One way to hold this word: tell plus tale. Something was supposed to stay untold, and something else tells it anyway. Sometimes the is a person, the child who runs to the adult. Sometimes it is a detail nobody meant to leave: on the sofa, a red face, a footprint in mud. And sometimes it is a part bolted on for exactly this purpose, a light on a or a ribbon on a sail. Whoever or whatever is doing it, the shape is the same: the situation ends up speaking.
From the word’s history
From tell plus tale, perhaps altered from the earlier taleteller, from Middle English tale tellere, literally a teller of tales.
由 tell（說）加 tale（故事）組成，來源說它可能是更早的 taleteller 變來的，也就是中古英文的 tale tellere，字面就是「說故事的人」。這條線索說明了為什麼「人」的那個意思最接近字面，其他意思都是把「說故事」這個角色交給了別的東西。
Wiktionary entry supplied in this batch's evidence packet (source_ref kaikki:3f6f69a190036ae4:742599061); the source itself hedges with perhaps
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