Black outline tattoo of an open book with small legs on the upper arm, shown against a brick wall with a hand holding the arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Open book with legs on an upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A simple black outline of an open book with its pages fanned upwards and two small legs extending from the bottom, drawn in a cartoon-like style. The tattoo sits on the outer upper arm, with a hand gripping the arm on the left and a patterned top visible at the edge of the frame. The plain brick wall behind gives a neutral background, and the linework is uniform with no shading.

Upper arm Book Open book Leg Cartoon

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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

So there was the book, pages flapping like a gull's wings and two little legs going nineteen to the dozen across the platform at Cressbridge, while the guard stood with his whistle halfway to his lips and his mouth hanging open. The book had sat on the third shelf of the reading room for eighty years, its spine cracked by a girl called Mabel Tunks who read it under the desk when she should have been doing sums. Every evening it had heard the other books sigh when the lamps went out, and every evening it had decided that a story ought to be somewhere, not just waiting to be somewhere.

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It had no ticket, of course. It offered the stationmaster a pressed violet from chapter nine instead, and the stationmaster, who had once been a boy with a torn copy of the same book, looked at the violet for a long while and then waved the book through the gate. The 6.42 was already breathing steam. Doors slammed. The book leapt the gap between the platform and the step, caught the handrail with a corner of its cover, and hauled itself aboard among a family with sandwiches and a man asleep under a newspaper.

The train pulled out past the signal box, and the book fanned itself open on the luggage rack, pages turning in the wind from the window until it came to rest at the last line of its last chapter. Nobody on that carriage could read the words from where they sat, but the girl in the corner seat leaned forward, squinted, and smiled as if she already knew how it ended. The book, for its part, was content to be carried.