Fine line black tattoos on a man's forearms showing a stack of book spines, quotation marks, lettering and small flying silhouettes.

Book stack, quotes and birds on forearms

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A man with crossed arms wears a dark denim shirt, showing fine line black tattoos across both forearms. One forearm has a stack of book spines with lettering, large quotation marks and a line of text, and the other has a quotation in script, a large quotation mark and small flying silhouettes, with three more flying figures on the hand. The work is entirely black ink in fine, even linework with no shading or colour.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Hand Book Text Quote Bird Silhouette Flying figure

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are sorting the book crate in the back of the caravan when the ropes start singing overhead, and you already know the wind is wrong for flying. Mr Pruett said so at breakfast, tapping his pipe against a biscuit tin. Still, the Lark sisters climb their rigging every evening at seven, and the crowd on the field has paid its pennies to watch them fall off nothing.

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You have eleven books in your crate that nobody has bought in a month: a battered Treasure Island, two Verne novels with the spines gone soft as bread, a Milton with no front board, and a green cloth volume whose title has worn off entirely. You tuck a loose sheet into the Milton, one line in your neatest copperplate, because it is the only sentence you own that you believe. To die would be an awfully big adventure. You wrote it in the margin, crossed it out, then wrote it again.

When the lamps go up you carry the crate to the trapeze tent and find Ada Lark on the bottom rung, stretching her shoulders with her ankles bound in linen. She takes the Milton without asking and reads your margin, then wants to know who taught you to spell adventure like that. You tell her nobody. She laughs, hands it back, and says the wind has dropped.

Then the drum rolls and she goes up, and you watch the three of them leave the platform in a line, black against the canvas like sheets of paper caught in a draught, and for the length of one held breath nothing on the field is falling at all.