Traditional-style tattoo of an open book with the words turn over a new leaf in black script and a red leaf on the page, sitting on the upper arm.

Open book reading turn over a new leaf

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

An open book is shown with its right-hand pages curling upward, and the left page carries the handwritten-style lettering turn over a new leaf. A small red leaf sits on the page beside the word over, and the book's edges are outlined in red. Black linework and grey shading give the pages and cover depth against the pale skin, with the design centred on the arm.

Traditional Lettering Upper arm Book Open book Leaf Lettering Script Text

Find an artist for this

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

The glue had cooked into the spine of the ledger over forty winters, so Alma worked her bone folder under the first board one slow inch at a time. Dennis Hale stood by the radiator in his wet coat and tried not to watch her hands. The shop smelled of paste and warm paper, and somewhere below, the chip fryer on Crown Street ticked as it cooled.

Keep reading

Inside, every line was in his father's square capitals: coal, two shillings; a christening cup for the Dobson boy; a sum owed to a man called Pike, struck through in red ink. Alma did not read the figures. Binders learn to read the margins instead, where a person's habits sit: the pencil ticks, the thumbprints gone grey at the corners, the page that has been opened more often than the others.

On the page where the book fell open of its own accord, a sycamore leaf lay pressed between the sheets, flat as a biscuit and gone the colour of old brick at its edges. Alma lifted it with tweezers and laid it on blotting paper. "He put that there," Dennis said. "The autumn Mum went. I always thought he meant to finish the page."

Alma took a clean sheet from the drawer, cut it to size, and handed him a pencil. "Then finish it yourself. Start with the date." He wrote it slowly, the way his father had, and she set the leaf into the new page with a strip of Japanese tissue, where it would hold. She closed the ledger on the bench. The old page was done with; the new one lay open under the lamp, its first line still waiting.