Black and grey tattoo of an open book and quill with a scroll of Italian script on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Open book and quill with Italian script

Back · Black and grey · Photo

An open book with shaded pages sits beneath a large quill feather that curls up and over its top edge, with a swirling flourish at the upper left. A scroll below the feather carries a line of Italian script in a cursive hand. The work is rendered in black and grey with soft shading and fine outlines, set against pale skin on the upper back.

Back Book Quill Feather Scroll Swirl Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferry was late again, so Maud Lennox was still at her desk when the crate came up from the quay, its corners split and smelling of brine. Inside, wrapped in oilcloth, lay a book with its pages fanned open as if someone had been reading aloud and had only stepped out for a moment. Its margins were crowded with a slanting Italian hand, and beneath a drawing of a quill a line had been written and underlined twice: ciò che appartiene insieme si ruminisce bene.

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She had no Italian beyond what the church choir had taught her, but she knew the hand. It belonged to Ettore Caruso, who had come to Skerrin in the spring to mend the net sheds and stayed on as clerk for the herring dues. He had kept the parish registers in better order than any man before him, and he had left in October without a word, owing her a fortnight's wages and a pot of ink.

She spent the evening with a borrowed dictionary and a candle stub, working out that the line said something like: what belongs together, you should turn over slowly, the way cattle chew the cud. Tucked inside the back cover she found a folded page addressed only to M., unsealed, asking her to keep the book safe until the spring boats came back, and to ignore the rumours at the inn about where he had gone.

At first light she trimmed a new nib, dipped it, and wrote beneath his line in her own square letters: Then I will keep it. She blotted the page, set the book on the sill where the ferry light would catch it, and waited for the tide to turn.