Small teal numerals reading 398.2 in a simple script on the inner wrist, with a hand holding a Grimm's Fairy Tales book and a tiara behind it.

398.2 numerals on the inner wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A hand holds a dark green hardback copy of Grimm's Fairy Tales with gold tooling, topped by a silver tiara and a maroon fabric on a floral quilt. The tattoo on the inner wrist is a small set of teal numerals, 398.2, drawn in a thin, slightly rounded script with solid linework. The composition is a close, slightly angled shot with the book and tiara softly out of focus at the top.

Lettering Forearm Numeral Book

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The girl came back to the Ashcombe branch every Thursday with the same copy of Grimm, and every Thursday Mrs Ada Pring checked it in with a small sigh. The spine had been cracked so often that the gold tooling had worn down to the boards. Tilly Marsh never apologised for it. She set the book on the counter, squared it with both palms, and asked where the glass coffin was kept.

Keep reading

Ada knew where the glass coffin was kept. It lived under 398.2, between a Russian bundle of folk tales and a sixpenny Perrault that nobody had borrowed since decimalisation. The trouble was the back sleeve of the Grimm, which had begun to fill with slips in a hand Ada did not recognise. Each slip gave a shelf mark and a tale, and the tales were never in the order the book printed them. 'Rapunzel's gone down to the cellar,' Tilly said, not looking up. 'It's 398.2 down there too, if you count from the wrong end.'

Ada went down with a torch on the Saturday, past the boiler and the damp rolls of old maps, to a row of steel stacks she was certain had been bricked over in 1962. The shelf labels ran from 398.2 to 398.2, and every spine on them was blank. She found one book with a pencilled title, The Girl Who Waited, and when she opened it the pages were full of clean white margins and one line repeated in the same careful hand: due back when she is ready.

On Thursday she pulled the card from the Grimm's sleeve and found her own name in the borrower's column, under a due date eleven years away. She did not renew it. She stamped the date in, carried the book down to the cellar herself, and shelved it where the tale could wait for someone patient enough to open it.