Close photo of a solid black silhouette of a leaning figure beside shaded grey stacked books with a red ribbon, tattooed on the thigh.

Black silhouette figure beside stacked books on thigh

Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A solid black silhouette of a figure in a leaning, striding pose sits on the left of the design, with a stack of books on the right. The books are shaded in grey with fine outlines and a red ribbon or bookmark hangs from them. The photo is taken at an angle, with patterned fabric visible at the bottom edge.

Thigh Silhouette Figure Book Ribbon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody at the Hartley Road branch believed me about the shadow, so after the first week I stopped mentioning it. It was tall and narrow and walked the far end of the poetry shelves once the lights dropped to their night setting, leaning forward like someone running late for a bus. It never cast a second shadow. I checked twice with the torch from the cupboard under the issue desk.

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The stack by the window was where it always stopped. Someone had left withdrawn hardbacks there for the Friends of the Library sale, grey cloth spines gone soft at the corners, and a red ribbon hung from the top volume like a tongue. On the third night the shadow lifted that book with two fingers and held it open, and I felt the words through the floorboards more than I heard them.

I asked Desmond, who has done nights here since before the roof was replaced, what it wanted. He said it was a reader who had left before the last page, and the building keeps a place warm for them. Books in this town get passed from hand to hand until the spines give out. I said that was nonsense, right up until the shadow reached the end of the row, stopped, and turned its head towards me as if it had found the bit it was looking for.

On Friday I put the ribboned book back on its shelf myself, open at the page it had been holding. The shadow did not come. In the morning the ribbon lay across a page I had never read, and tucked into the gutter was a borrower's slip with my own name written in pencil and a return date three weeks off.