Black fine line tattoo of birds flying up from an open book with fluttering pages on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Birds and pages rising from a book

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink tattoo shows an open book at the lower end, with loose pages lifting from it and a flock of birds in flight rising up the arm. The linework is fine and the book has light hatched shading, with no colour used. The design runs diagonally up the skin against a soft, blurred knitted fabric in the background.

Fine line Forearm Bird Book Flight

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The schoolmaster at Hollin Cross kept his books in a tin trunk under the bell rope, because the damp in the schoolhouse got into everything else. In the winter of the hard frost, a woman came to his door with a parcel under her shawl. Her name was Ada Veal, and she lived alone where the forest began, past the last cottage and the broken stile. She set the parcel on his table and unwrapped it from oilcloth. Inside was a book with a cracked spine and no title on the cover.

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'I can't read it any more,' she said. 'My eyes have gone to milk. But my mother read it to me, and her mother before her, and it must be read aloud at dusk or the words sit still and go stale.' He read the first page by the stove. As the last word left his mouth, a page lifted from the book and turned over in the draught, and out of its folds a blackbird rose and flew through the open shutter into the trees. He put it down to the stove smoke. The second evening, two pages lifted, and then three.

By Candlemas the village children were following the flock to the edge of the wood, where the birds settled on the branches and shook out their wings like pages. The sentences, the children swore, could be heard in the rustle of them. The schoolmaster grew thin from reading. Ada Veal sat by the stove with her hands folded and listened, and when he reached the final page she thanked him and asked him to keep the book.

He did not read the last page. On the first thaw he carried the book to the wood and opened it on a stump. The page that remained lifted, hesitated, and went up into the grey branches, and from the tallest tree came one clear call, as if someone were answering a question he had never thought to ask aloud. When he closed the book it was blank, but the spine had stopped cracking.