Small fine line tattoo of an open book in black ink on the upper shoulder near the collarbone, with a red top and bookshelves visible behind.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Open book on a shoulder

Fine line · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A small open book is drawn in thin dark ink on the upper chest near the shoulder, with the pages sketched in simple outline. The tattoo is shown in soft focus against smooth skin, with a bookshelf in the blurred background. The composition is a tight crop showing only the lips, chin and shoulder.

Fine line Shoulder Book 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 yourself down on that upturned crate, the one with the fewest splinters, and mind the lamp, it smokes when the wind comes off the Dee. You'll want the story from the start, which is the only place Pemberton's ever bothered to start anything. The show was called Pemberton and Gall's Travelling Marvels, and by the summer of the drought it had three elephants, one of them lame, and a ringmaster who kept his accounts in a book no bigger than a hymnal.

Keep reading

That book was the thing Walter Gall loved most. Every act was written in it in brown ink: the knife-thrower, the girl who rode two horses at once, the strongman who could lift a piano and sing while he did it. When the bank took the wagons, Walter carried the book under his coat through three counties, and whenever the crowd thinned to a handful he'd open it on his knee and read out the acts that were no longer there. Folk stayed for the reading. Nobody paid for it, and nobody asked for their money back.

On the last night the tent was nearly empty and the rain came through the canvas in threads. Walter opened the book at a clean page and found it blank. He sat a long while with his thumb on the paper. Then he read out the girl's name and the horse's name and the drum roll all the same, and a little boy in the second row stood up and said, go on then, and clapped. Walter swore afterwards that the page had gone warm under his hand, and the boy never once looked down at it.