Traditional tattoo of a closed book with an eye and a yellow banner reading NERD LIFE, with red ribbon and sunburst rays, on a section of skin.

Book and eye banner tattoo

Traditional · Other · Mixed · Photo

A bold traditional tattoo shows a stacked book with a staring eye on its cover, a yellow banner across the middle reading NERD LIFE, and a red bookmark ribbon hanging below. Black outlines, dark grey shading and small red accents give the design a classic flash look, with short rays radiating from the top corners. The tattoo fills most of the frame against plain skin and a pale background.

Traditional Other Book Eye Banner Text Ray Sunburst

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ledger came up the pass in a mule's pannier the spring the snow refused to leave, and nobody at the hut at Harrow Gap could read its cover. I could. My mother had taught me letters beside the stove, and a winter at a toll-hut leaves a person plenty of time to puzzle out a stranger's book. The cover showed an eye set in the leather, red at its centre, staring at the door as if it were waiting for someone to be late.

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Every traveller who crossed had to give a name, and I wrote each one down before the lamp was lit. The book never needed correcting. Names I misspelt came out right by morning, and once a carter's boy swore the eye had blinked. I laughed at him, then caught myself checking the page each evening, the way you touch a sore tooth.

In February a woman came over the pass with a strip of red cloth tied to her staff, and she asked me to read her own name back to her. I opened the ledger to the day's page and found it already there, in my hand, dated a year on, with a line beneath it: she is not to be let through. I had never written that. I stood in the cold with the pen between my fingers, and the eye stared up at me from the cover, patient as a clock.

I turned to a fresh page and wrote her name, then the word through, then shut the book on its red ribbon and went out to lift the bar on the gate. The snow was already running off the rocks. Behind me the ledger stayed closed, and I have decided that counts as a kindness.