Colourful watercolour-style tattoo of an open book with galaxy smoke, crystals and flowers on the thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Open book with galaxy smoke on thigh

Other · Colour · Photo

An open book sits at the centre of the design, with swirling galaxy smoke in blue, purple and teal rising from its pages. Pink and purple crystals flank the book, and purple and yellow flowers with green leaves sit at its base. The soft colour washes, splashes and fine dark outlines give the piece a painted, watercolour-like finish on pale skin.

Other Book Galaxy Nebula Crystal Flower Leaf Star Smoke

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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

The almanac-keeper of Little Harrow had one rule, and it was that the library shut at dusk whatever was happening inside it. Ada Penrose broke it the winter the river froze, because the boy from the farm had come running in with snow on his collar and a book under his coat that he swore had been left on the bridge by nobody at all.

Keep reading

It was a plain brown thing with a broken spine, and when she opened it the pages were full of stars. Not printed stars. They lifted off the paper like breath on a cold morning and curled up towards the rafters in ribbons of blue and violet, and where they touched the old crystal lamp on the reading table, the glass began to hum and throw red light across the floorboards. The boy sat down very quietly on the nearest chair.

They read until the lamp burned low. The story was about a girl who lived at the edge of a town and kept the sky folded inside a book, and who was forced, every hundred years, to let it out for one night so the town could remember what it had been given. Ada did not like the ending. She read it twice anyway, because the purple flowers pressed between the last leaves had begun to open.

In the morning the book was gone and the library smelled of rain. But on the step outside, where the frost had melted in a ring, there were three yellow petals and a single green leaf, and the river had come back to life with a sound like someone turning a page.