Colour tattoo of an open book on a stack of books with black letters floating above it, on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Open book with floating letters on the ribs

Realism · Ribs · Colour · Photo

An open book rests on a stack of two or three closed books, with black serif letters, including T, C, H, A, N and S, drifting upward from its pages. The book and stack are shaded with browns, tans, blues and olive greens, giving soft gradient highlights along the page edges. The tattoo sits on the side of the torso, with the letters arranged diagonally across the upper part of the design.

Realism Ribs Book Letter Stack of books Open book

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The letters always got out first. Every winter my father stacked the good books on the cabin table to keep them dry, and every winter the damp crept up through the floorboards and loosened the type from the pages, so that by February there were words drifting about the boat like moths. I found an L wedged behind the stove and a whole N under my bunk. Mum said they'd settle if you left them alone long enough, which was what she said when she meant the boat was about to take on water.

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We worked the Grand Union with a hold full of secondhand novels and atlases, selling at locks to anyone who'd stop. A lock-keeper's wife at Cowley paid a shilling for a battered Tennyson and gave us dripping and gossip besides. A man at Hanwell wanted only the maps. He tapped a harbour on the Cornish coast and said he'd been born there, and I believed him, because the ink on his thumb was the same grey as the spine of the book he held.

That autumn the letters grew bolder. Some nights an S would rise off the page and hang over the table while the kettle ticked, and in the morning there would be a C on the windowsill and an A caught in the coat hooks. I kept them in a tobacco tin, sorting them the way Dad sorted fish, until the tin was too full to close.

At Braunston a boy with a torn jacket asked if I had any letters for sale. I gave him the S for nothing. He held it up to the light, grinned, and ran off down the towpath. When I opened the tin that night, the rest of them lifted out together and rose toward the ceiling, slow as sparks, looking for somewhere new to land.