Black and grey tattoo of several open books with hatched shading and bold outlines on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Floating open books on an upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

Several open books are scattered across the upper arm, drawn at different sizes and angles as if floating. The linework is bold black outline with parallel hatching on the page edges and covers, giving the books a solid, shaded look. Partial outlines of other tattoos, including a heart and a dark bolt-like shape, appear at the edges of the frame against plain skin and a grey top.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The year the river ran backwards, the people of Hollin Cross found their books had begun to leave them. Pages lifted from the shelves of the schoolhouse each morning and drifted out over the water meadows like gulls that had forgotten how to land. Old Mabel Ferrier kept her sister's almanac under the mangle, weighted with a flatiron, and still it rose at dawn and went up the lane without her.

Keep reading

The children chased them with nets made from bedsheets. Tomas Quill, who was nine and thought himself clever, climbed the church tower and waited for the books to pass. They came by in a flock, pages open and turning, covers snapping like wings. He caught one by its spine. It was a book of sea shanties with the corners worn soft, and when he opened it the words were gone, only the ruled lines and the shadows of letters left behind.

He carried it down to the meadow and set it on the grass. The others gathered round. Nobody spoke. Then Mabel came with her flatiron in her apron and sat beside him, and she began to hum the tune of the first shanty from memory. One by one the books came back down out of the sky and settled around them, open to the pages where their words had been, until the meadow looked like a field of white stones marked with tiny black hands.

And Tomas understood, though he could not have said it, that the books had not been leaving. They had been looking for someone to read them aloud.

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