Black and grey tattoo of a castle, crescent moon and stars rising from an open book on the upper back, with a small circle and triangle symbol at the base of the book.

Castle rising from an open book on upper back

Traditional · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a castle with several spires and towers standing above an open book, with a crescent moon and scattered stars in the sky behind it. The castle and book are rendered in bold black outlines with smooth shading, while the sky and ground use fine stippled dots. A small circle and triangle symbol sits at the centre of the book's spine, and the composition is symmetrical across the upper back.

Traditional Dotwork Back Castle Open book Crescent moon Star Moon Symbol Triangle Circle

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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

Mrs Abernethy had bound books for forty years in the back room above the chandler's on Quay Street, and she knew the weight of a finished spine the way other women knew the weight of a sleeping child. So when the boy from the ferry office brought in a ledger with its boards split and its pages gone soft as cloth, she did not ask what he had done to it. She asked how long it had been under the sea.

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He shrugged. It had come up in a crab pot off the Farne grounds, and the skipper had tossed it in the bilge with the rest of the rubbish. Under the grey tide-stains, when she lifted the first leaf with a bone folder, there was a drawing in faded iron-gall ink. A tower leaned out of the margin, then another, then a whole row of them, slate and stone climbing up the page until they filled the gutter. Above them someone had pricked a crescent moon through the paper with a needle and scattered stars so fine they caught the lamp.

She worked three nights on it. On the fourth, the boy came back and found her asleep at the bench with her cheek against the sewing frame. The book lay open between them, and the castle had risen from the page the way a wet thing rises from water, its spires dark against a sky that had not been there the night before. The moon hung over its highest turret like a hook.

Nobody on Quay Street believed her when she told them. She stitched the ledger back together with waxed linen, pressed a small triangle inside a circle onto the spine as her mark, and kept it on the shelf by the window. Some mornings the page is blank. Some mornings the lamp catches a single star on the cover and she simply lets it burn.