Colour tattoo of stacked and open books in blue, red and brown above the script words "the world was hers for the reading" on the upper back.

Books and quote across the upper back

Lettering · Back · Mixed · Photo

A row of small books in blue, red and brown ink sits above the words "the world was hers for the reading" in black script lettering. The books vary in size and angle, with one open book and a few tiny red hearts or dots between them. The colour is bold and flat, with thin black outlines and the text set in a horizontal line across the skin.

Lettering Back Book Open book Heart Script Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Garstang expected Maud Pilling to read the whole cart before the fair had even opened, but she did, lifting each volume from the crate with her thumbs and setting it back exactly where it had lain. I kept the ledger on my knee and wrote down what she took. Two penny pamphlets, a Gulliver with the back board gone, a tiny red almanac no bigger than a playing card. She paid in eggs and a brass button, and once in a pressed rose that she laid flat on the counter as if it were a coin.

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By June she had read most of what we carried and had opinions on all of it. She told my father that Scott was a bore and Dickens was a bully, and she liked the books best when their spines were cracked and their corners soft from other people's thumbs. She kept a red ribbon in every one she finished, and where the ribbon ran out she drew a small heart in the margin in pencil, which my father said was against the rules and which he never once rubbed out.

The canal took the cart in September. The horse balked at the lock gate, the wheel went over, and forty books slid into the cut in a brown slurry while the three of us stood on the towpath and watched them drift like lost ducks. Maud waded in to the knee and came back with a blue-bound volume held over her head, its pages fanned open. The world was hers for the reading, she said, and she wasn't going to let it drown before she had finished.

She left for Liverpool that winter with a satchel and no ticket home. Years later a postcard came to the shop with a Portuguese stamp and a single line in pencil: the ink ran on the quay but the words stayed where I put them. My father pinned it above the till, and I still don't know which book she was holding.