Black ink tattoos on the upper back showing a mockingjay with an arrow, three flying birds, the Deathly Hallows symbol, a trident and the words books are proof humans can do magic.

Book quote with birds, Deathly Hallows and trident

Back · Black and grey · Photo

The upper back shows a black ink design of a bird silhouette with an arrow and three smaller flying bird silhouettes, arranged in a diagonal trail. Beside a triangle, circle and vertical line symbol on the left and a trident on the right, the phrase books are proof humans can do magic is set in three lines of gothic-style lettering. Only black ink is used, with solid filled silhouettes and clean outlines on smooth skin.

Back Bird Arrow Deathly hallows Trident Lettering Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Rain had been falling on the allotments since dawn, and Nell Abernathy was still prising a bent fork out of the mud when the boy from the mobile library came up the path with a cardboard box under his arm. "Mrs Ruddock's sister left these," he said. "Said you'd know what to do with them."

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Inside were eleven paperbacks swollen with damp, and a flat grey stone wrapped in oilcloth. Nell had spent forty years at the reference desk of the Carlisle Street branch and knew a deliberate mark when she saw one. Someone had pressed shapes into the endpaper with a hot nail: a triangle with a circle inside it and a line running down through the circle, a three-pronged spear, and a column of small birds lifting off the page as though they had been startled into flight.

She sat on an upturned crate by the compost heap and read the books in the order the sister had numbered them in pencil. By the fourth she understood the birds were not decoration. Each one sat beside a loan slip, and each slip carried a date in a hand she didn't recognise, a date that had not yet arrived.

On the last flyleaf, beneath a line about books and the strange things people manage with them, was a name and a branch number. Nell pocketed the stone, pulled on her boots and followed the birds down the hill toward the library, where the lights were already on and a girl stood in the doorway holding out a slip with Nell's own name printed on it.