Traditional style tattoo of a red book covered in eyes and stars, with a leafy border, on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Eyed book on the forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A colour tattoo of a closed book with a red cover, showing four eyes with blue irises and yellow outlines, surrounded by small star shapes. A leafy band runs along the lower edge of the book, and the subject is outlined in bold black lines. The tattoo is photographed side-on against a dark background, with shading that gives the book a raised, rounded look.

Traditional Forearm Book Eye Star Leaves

Find an artist for this

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

The rain had found the gap in the awning again, dripping onto the box of water-swollen paperbacks Marjorie had been saving for the skip. Dinah dragged the last crate under the tarpaulin and nearly knocked it over. At the bottom, wrapped in a bread bag, sat a book bound in red cloth, its corners rubbed to brass. Four eyes looked up from the cover, each set in a little nest of gold, and between them small stars had been stamped as if the binder wanted the sky keeping watch too.

Keep reading

She meant to price it at fifty pence and put it on the dead stock table, but the eyes kept catching the lamplight. Each time she turned to a customer she felt a faint tug at her sleeve, as if the thing had a view and did not care for hers. Mr Okafor from the fishmonger's stopped by for his Sunday crime novel and lingered over it. He said he would swear the middle eye had followed him down the aisle. Dinah laughed, but after he left she found she had turned the book face down.

At closing, with the shutters half down and the gutters roaring, she opened it. The pages were blank except for a line near the front in faded brown ink, asking whoever found it to keep watch for the one who had come back for it. Dinah read it twice. Then she looked at the leafy band along the lower edge, green gone grey with age, and remembered her grandmother saying every stall needed one honest thing that never sold.

She set it on the shelf above the till, spine out, and went home without locking the cash tin. Next morning a man in a wet waxed jacket came in asking for a book he could not quite name. The stars on the cover caught the light, and the four eyes turned towards him one after another, slow and patient, until he gave up searching and simply stood there, dripping, waiting to be recognised.