Colour tattoo on a forearm of a cartoon child in a red top reading a book, with green ferns and a blue and grey wave beneath.

Child reading on a wave with ferns

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A cartoon child in a red top sits reading an open book, with dark hair and simple outlined features. Green fern fronds rise on either side, and the figure rests on a grey-shaded wave edged with blue water. Bold outlines and flat colour fills dominate, with soft grey shading on the wave, set against blurred background on a forearm.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, the fire doesn't reach the back benches and neither does my memory. This is the one about Tamsin Reed, who was nine and could not be made to put a book down, not for bread, not for church, not for the goats.

Keep reading

The fern wood ran right up to the back of Holloway Cross then, and the children were forbidden past the stile. Tamsin went anyway, most evenings, with a stolen volume of tide tables under her arm. Past the last oak the ground turned soft and grey, and the bracken grew taller than her father. One evening the mist came down off the marsh like a wave breaking the wrong way, and it lifted her clean off the path. She did not scream. She sat down on the crest of it, opened her book at the ribbon, and kept reading, because the sentence was not finished.

The wave carried her out over the reeds and the church roof and the sleeping sheep, and it did not drop her until she reached the last line of the chapter. Then it set her down gently at the stile, wet to the knees, and the mist folded itself away like a shawl. Her mother found the book under the hedge, its pages dry as toast. Nobody in Holloway Cross ever saw the wave again, but the ferns along the stile have grown in a curl ever since, leaning towards whoever is reading.

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