Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Open book on the inner wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small open book is drawn in a thin black outline on the inner wrist, with the palm and fingers with dark nail polish visible above it. The linework is simple and even, with no shading, and the book is shown from the side with its pages curving slightly. The plain red backdrop makes the black ink stand out clearly.

Fine line Forearm Book Open book

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm always said the book was the only honest thing in the scriptorium, because it could be shut. He told the novices this on the first evening of the winter fast, when the wind came off the fens and rattled the shutters like a debtor at the gate. Then he would open his own volume on the lectern, the one with the cracked calf binding, and lift the first leaf with two fingers as though it might bruise.

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There was a boy that year called Tobias Reeve, sent up from the wool towns with a cough and a mouth that would not stay closed. He copied the Psalter wrong three times running, and each time Anselm made him sit with the spoiled page until the ink dried grey. On the fourth morning the boy came in with his cuff pushed back and a thin black line drawn on the inside of his wrist, a little book lying open, its pages lifting as if a breath had caught them. Anselm looked at it a long while. Then he asked who had drawn it, and the boy said he had, with a pen from the apothecary, and that it would never come off.

Anselm did not scold him. He took the boy's wrist in his cold hand and turned it to the window light. Forty years, he said, he had waited for a novice to carry the thing he was afraid to write down. Then he sent him back to the Psalter with the pen still in his fist.

They say the boy finished that Psalter in spring, and that the last leaf was blank except for the faintest pencil outline of a closed book, which Anselm refused to rub out.