Black and grey photograph, seen from behind, of an open book with feathers and a quill pen tattooed across a woman's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Open book and quill on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman seen from behind shows a tattoo of an open book with its pages fanned out, surrounded by feather plumes and a quill pen at the base. The design uses dark outlines with fine hatching and shading that gives the book and feathers depth. The image is black and white, with the tattoo centred between the shoulder blades against a blurred field and trees.

Back Book Feather Quill Pen

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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

Dear Mr Hallam,

Keep reading

I still have the Hardy you lent me in the fifth form, its spine cracked at the page where Tess walks out into the morning, and I finally understand why you kept pressing it on me. At the reunion in the back room of the Crown, Dawn Pritchard asked whether I was still scribbling, and I said yes, mostly in the margins of other people's shopping lists, which made her laugh the way she used to in double maths.

Nobody else remembered the poem you made us copy out for detention. I did. I stood by the sausage rolls reciting the first stanza to Gary Lusk, who looked at me as though I were a ghost from the cloakroom. Then I dug out the old dip pen from the bottom of my bag, the one with the feathered nib you used to tap on our desks when we talked through your readings, and I wrote the stanza out again on a paper napkin.

I am enclosing the napkin, which has a ring from a pint glass on it and one word smudged past reading. The pen I am keeping. Each time I uncap it, the nib makes the same stiff little sound as a new book being opened for the first time, and I think you would tell me to stop admiring my own handwriting and get on with the next chapter.

Yours, still in detention, Margaret