Black fine line tattoos across a person's neck, chest and shoulders, including open books, a quote, a book stack and large comma marks.

Literary quotes, open books and book stack on chest

Fine line · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A close view of a chest and neck covered in black tattoos that mix lettering, small line drawings and book motifs. Open books with tiny figures rise up the neck, a quote runs across the upper chest, and a stack of book spines sits on the right, with large comma shapes on each shoulder. The work is entirely black ink with fine, clean linework and sits against a black strapless top on pale skin.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the peat smoke, for this is the story of the crates that came over on the Tuesday boat to Inish Corran, and what climbed out of them when Donal Gorrie cracked the first lid on the slipway.

Keep reading

They were books nobody on the island had asked for, sent by a charity in Glasgow that had clearly been emptying its shelves for years. Every spine was split and every cover was soft as a boiled sock. Donal pulled one out, opened it hard the way a man opens a letter he doesn't want, and out came a girl in a red coat, no bigger than your thumb, shouting that she had been waiting nine chapters for someone to notice her. Then a fellow in a grey suit flapped off after her, and a rabbit that had clearly been in a hurry, and a pair of swimmers who went straight over the harbour wall and into the sea. Ishbel Crane, who taught the school for forty years, told Donal to let them go. A book is only a door, she said, and you cannot keep a room by holding the handle.

So they all went, up over the dunes and out past the lighthouse, until the air above the slipway was thick with small figures and the gulls didn't know where to look. By evening the crates were empty and the island was quieter than it had ever been.

One was left. A small man in a brown waistcoat had stuck to the inside back cover of the last book, and no amount of coaxing would budge him. Ishbel put that book on the dresser with the spine turned out, and he's there yet, standing at the margin with his hat in his hands, waiting for somebody to open the page and read him home.

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