Black and grey line tattoos of a book stack, quote marks and lettering on a man's forearms, with small line drawings near the wrist.

Book stack and quotes on forearms

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two forearms show black and grey tattoos. On one arm, a stack of drawn books with their spines lettered sits beside a large quotation mark, with more lettering running above and below. On the other arm, a small line of script sits beside a large quotation mark, with tiny black silhouettes of figures flying across the lower forearm.

Forearm Book Quote Lettering Script Silhouette Flying figure

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

At Hollin Bridge station there was a shelf in the ticket office where people left the books they had finished on the trains. Mrs Pryce, who had kept the office for thirty-one years, took them in without charge. She only asked that each reader copy out one line they could not forget onto a slip of paper and tuck it inside the cover, so the next person would have something to stop on.

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A boy called Tobias came every Thursday off the milk train, too thin for his coat, and read standing up with his back against the pigeon crate. He copied his lines in pencil, folded the slips into birds, and launched them off the footbridge toward the goods sheds. Mrs Pryce said nothing about the littering. She only noticed which books came back with the most slips tucked in.

One winter he stopped coming. The shelf filled with books nobody took, and the slips piled up in a biscuit tin. In April a book came back on the milk train, a river-coloured thing with its spine cracked, and inside the back cover was one last slip in his hand. It said he had gone to work on the boats at Harwich and was sorry about the birds. Under that he had written a line she did not recognise, and beneath it, smaller: keep the shelf full.

She put the book on the shelf, under the lamp, where a passenger might see it. Then she took a fresh slip from the tin, copied the line out for herself, and folded it into a bird, which she set on the windowsill facing the sheds.