Small tattoo of an open book with a pink cover and scattered grey letters above it, on the inner forearm.

Open book and floating letters on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A small open book with a pink-red cover and grey pages sits at an angle on the forearm, with several black capital and lowercase letters floating above its top edge. The book is drawn with simple outlines and light shading, giving it a flat, illustrative look. The composition is centred on the book, with the letters trailing up and to the left against plain skin.

Lettering Forearm Book Letter Open book

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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

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the wind, for it has been at my book again. Hold still, Morag's boy, and I will tell you how the letters got out. My grandmother kept the island's tales in a red-backed book on the windowsill of the schoolhouse at Sgeir Dubh, and nobody was let touch it except on a Sunday. Its pages were grey with age and smelled of peat smoke. On the morning the herring boats went out and did not come home for three days, the book fell open on its own.

Keep reading

The women gathered in the kirk and read the names aloud, and each name rose from the page like a gull lifting off the rocks. A G for Gillies, who had the blue boat. An R for Ruaraidh, who could mend a net in the dark. A small j and a small a for the two brothers who had quarrelled over a dog and never spoken since. They wheeled over the chapel roof and went out past the skerries, looking for the men they belonged to.

The boats came in on the Tuesday, low in the water and singing badly. Nobody asked how they had found their way through the fog, though the young ones swore they had seen a string of grey letters bobbing ahead of the bow like buoys. My grandmother only smiled and closed the book. The pages were blank after that, all but the pink cover, which stayed warm to the touch.

So when you hear your name called across the water, lads, don't be too quick to answer. Some of those letters are still out there, and they know the way home better than we do.