Black fine line book stacks, quotation marks, Peter Pan silhouettes and quote lettering shown as a flash sheet, with the designs applied to a forearm in the lower right photo.

Book and quote designs on forearms

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Flash

The main panel is a flash sheet of black line-drawn designs: stacked books with titles, open books, large quotation marks, flying Peter Pan silhouettes and several lines of lettering, including a Robert Frost quote. Two smaller photos show the designs as cards on grass and applied to a person's forearms, with the book stacks and quotation marks visible on the skin. Everything is in black ink and greys on a white or light background.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Book Open book Silhouette Flying Quote Lettering Flash sheet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada had been binding the same brown leather for three winters before the letter came asking for it back. The shop sat above a launderette in Hebden Bridge, and she worked under a lamp that hummed, sewing signatures while the steam from the machines rose through the floorboards. Her father had taught her that a book should open flat and stay open, and that a careless binder could be found out by the spine that cracked on the third page.

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The letter was from a widow in Halifax who wanted her husband's shelf made right. She had sent a list in pencil: Perks, Choke, Fountainhead, Catcher in the Rye, Brave New World, their spines faded to the colour of weak tea. Ada rebacked each one and pressed the boards under a stone, her hands careful until she reached the last parcel. That one had no title at all, only a pencil drawing on the flyleaf of a boy in mid-air, with a thin line of shadow trailing behind him like a ribbon.

She did not charge for that one. Instead she sewed a folded square of white paper into its spine and wrote on it the line the widow had underlined twice in the margin: to die would be an awfully big adventure. It was a child's sentence, Ada thought, the kind a man might read aloud to his wife when the lamp was low and the rain was on the window. She knew nothing of the husband beyond his books, and the books said plenty about where he had been.

The reply came a week later, two lines in soft pencil. Thank you for the boy. We read him every night, and the end was the part he liked best. Ada pinned it above the bench beside her father's bone folder. Each morning, before the launderette opened and the steam began again, she lifted the lamp and checked the spine of that book, only to see that the paper had held.