Black and grey fine line tattoo of open books turning into flying birds, running up the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Books turning into birds on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows several open books at the lower forearm, with their pages lifting and becoming small birds in flight as the design rises towards the wrist. The linework is thin and the shading is soft grey, with the books and birds rendered in simple outlines and light tones. The arm is photographed against a wooden floor and a patterned sofa, with the tattoo fairly central in the frame.

Fine line Forearm Book Bird Flight

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the third step, it's gone soft with the damp, and don't touch the brass until I've lit the lamp, for it bites. Now. You want the story of the books from the wreck, or of the birds? They're the same story, if you sit still long enough to hear it.

Keep reading

The crate came ashore in the big February gale, wedged in the kelp below the north rocks. My father hauled it up with a gaff and a curse, and inside were forty-odd books swollen like bread dough, every spine split. He dried them on the stove rail for a month. Each night the pages curled a little and tried to lift, the way a wet gull tries its wings on a fence post, and he swore it was the draught from the flue.

Then came the autumn my sister Nell read the one about the cartographer's daughter aloud to the kettle, because there was nobody else to listen. She got as far as the sea crossing when the page lifted off the table, slow as a sycamore leaf, and turned itself into a bird with the ink still wet along its wing. Three more followed before she stopped reading and started running. We counted seventeen by Michaelmas, all going out over the water towards the mainland, and not one has ever come back to be read again.

So if you find a book on the shore, leave it be, and read it only where the wind can hear you. Keep your voice low. A story wants to go somewhere, and the good ones always find their way out.