Pencil and ink drawing of an open book outline, with lettering running along its edges that lists book genres and the words I love books.

Hand-lettered open book design with genre list

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A hand-drawn outline of an open book, with its pages fanned at the top and a spine band across the middle. Hand-lettered text follows the outline and reads I like books, history books, mystery books, fantasy, science and fairy tale books. The linework is black on plain paper, with no shading or colour.

Lettering Book Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hush now, the kettle's not boiled and I'm not done with the bridge. The guard at the Varra crossing had a moustache like a wet broom, and he wanted my case open on the table. Forty years I had carried books over that river, and never once had a man asked what was in the spine. So I lifted out the big one, the one with its pages fanned out like a gull's wings, and I held it up so he could read the words running round its edge.

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I like books, I love books, history books, mystery books, fantasy, science and fairy tale books, it said, every letter hand-lettered by my sister, who had a steadier hand than God and a far worse temper. The guard squinted. He could not read English, but he knew a list when he saw one, and he knew no sensible smuggler bothers with a list. He asked what kind of woman carries a library across a border. I told him the kind who has to. Then I laid the book flat, and the band across its middle fell open like a door.

He did not look inside. He looked at the words. Then he asked me, very quietly, to read him the fairy tale. So I did. I read him the one about the miller's daughter who spun gold from straw and hid her true name in the thread, and I read until the lamp guttered and the shift changed. He listened with his chin in his hand.

When the new man came he stamped my papers without raising his eyes. I stepped onto the far bank with my case still heavy and my name still in the thread.