Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Birds rising from an open book

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows an open book at the bottom with its pages fanned out, and several birds in flight rising from the pages and trailing towards the top of the frame. The design uses fine black hatching and stippled dots to build shading in an engraving-like style. The photograph shows only the arm against a plain light background, with the design filling most of the frame.

Dotwork Upper arm Book Bird Open book Flight

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mail boat came over from Oban on Thursdays when the swell allowed, and it was the only thing on Ardmor that ever arrived on time. I kept the library in the old schoolhouse, three shelves of damp paperbacks and a lectern my grandfather had carved from driftwood. Nobody borrowed much. The fishermen read the shipping forecast, the women read the catalogues, and the children read whatever I could persuade them into.

Keep reading

The book came in a crate of Mrs Gillies's jam jars, wrapped in oilcloth, with no name on the flyleaf. Its pages were fanned open as if someone had been reading aloud and stopped to listen to the gulls. When I lifted it, a dozen small grey birds rose off the paper with a sound like tearing silk and went out through the broken pane above the door. I told myself the damp had got into the ink. Then the swallows came back in the evening, perched along the lectern edge, and ruffled their feathers as though they were waiting for the next line.

I went to the mainland that winter to have my chest seen to and left the door on the latch. When I came back in March, the book sat closed on the lectern and the room smelled of salt and heather. Someone had turned every blank leaf at the back and filled it with pencilled arrows, tiny flight paths heading south, then north, then out past the lighthouse and off the edge of the page.

Mrs Gillies says it is a sea chart. I say it is a diary kept by things that cannot write. I leave the window open now. Each morning I fan the pages wide and let whatever wants to leave, leave, and each evening I count what has come back.