Colour tattoo of an open book reading We're all stories in the end, with blue flowers and vines, on a limb in a close-up photo.

Open book with a quote and blue flowers

Lettering · Other · Mixed · Photo

An open book sits at the centre of the design, with its pages shaded in soft tan and sepia tones and outlined in dark grey. The phrase We're all stories in the end is written across the right page in a blackletter-style script, with a fine swirl and vine beneath it. Small blue flowers with grey shading cluster at the lower corner and trail up the left edge.

Lettering Botanical Other Book Quote Flower Vine Text

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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 Hal, I finally found it. Tide-Wrack, the copy we took from the Eastgate library in the summer of 1994, the one you swore we'd post back once we'd finished it. It was wedged under the loft hatch at Dad's place in Margate, wrapped in a Co-op carrier bag, and your name was still on the flyleaf in the careful pencil you had before you started signing things like a solicitor.

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We never got to the end, did we? You went to Leeds, I went to the coast, and the book went wherever library books go when nobody has the nerve to return them. But the last page had a note in the margin, in my handwriting, I'm nearly sure: "we're all stories in the end." Under it, two blue forget-me-nots, pressed flat and gone the colour of weak tea. I don't remember pressing them. I do remember you reading the last chapter aloud behind the bike sheds, your voice cracking on the name of the sea captain.

The reunion is Saturday at the Ashdown hall. They'll have the same urn, the same sausage rolls, and a lost property box nobody has opened since the millennium. I'm bringing the book. Find me by that box and read me the ending the way you did before, and we can see whether the story was ever ours to finish. Love, Bev.