Two matching forearm tattoos: a shaded grey game controller on the left and a colour stack of books on the right, each with the words I have lived a thousand lives.

Matching controller and books forearm tattoos

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

Two forearms show a pair of matching tattoos, each with the phrase I have lived a thousand lives above the image. The left tattoo is a shaded black and grey game controller with a light grey pad and purple buttons, and the right is a stack of books in teal, mustard and pink with outlined page edges. The colour is mixed, with the controller in greyscale and the books in brighter inks, arranged side by side for a balanced composition.

Forearm Book Video game Text Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Marnie had been counting miles the way other people counted sheep, and by the time the Corolla coughed itself to a stop beside a cattle grid, she had reached four hundred and twelve. The sun sat low over the flats. Her brother Lew leaned out of the passenger window and squinted at the dashboard as if it might explain itself.

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"Battery," he said. "Or the alternator. Or the sky."

She dug in the footwell for the shoebox they had packed in a hurry: an old grey console with a tangle of cable, a pad with worn purple buttons, and two paperbacks swollen from the damp of their grandmother's loft. She clicked the torch on and off while Lew wandered into the scrub. Somewhere a dog barked at nothing in particular.

When he came back he had a pocketful of smooth stones and a plan. They would play the game they used to play as children, where each turn you became someone who had already survived the last level. Marnie took the pad and he took the paperback with the cracked spine. He read aloud about a lighthouse keeper who had lost seven boats and kept the lamp lit through each of them, and she pressed the buttons to match his voice, shoulder to shoulder on the hot bonnet.

At dawn the car started on the first turn of the key, as if it had only been sulking. Lew was asleep with the book open on his chest. Marnie put the pad back in the box, took the wheel, and drove on towards the grey line of the coast with the sun coming up behind her, already thinking about which life she would try next.