Black ink fine line tattoo of an open book with lettering and a cup of coffee on a saucer, placed on the side of the torso above the hip.

Open book with library quote and coffee cup

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

An open book is drawn in black linework with two lines of handwritten-style lettering on its pages, reading "They walked to the library day after day" and "And read page after page after page". A cup and saucer sit beside the book at the right, with a small shaded area suggesting the cup's form. The design is in black ink only and is centred on the skin, with a purple top visible above it.

Fine line Lettering Ribs Book Quote Text Coffee cup Saucer

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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

Every morning for a year, Nell Garside walked the two miles from Thrushgill to Carrow Castle, past the sheep and the stile with the broken gate, because the only library left in the valley had been fitted into the old gatehouse. The roof leaked over the Victorian novels. The town branch had closed in the spring, and the castle trustees, who had never once opened the place to anyone, had grudgingly let the donated stock sit in the chapel where the vaults stayed dry.

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Her mother had kept the desk there before Nell was born, and Nell had inherited the key on a loop of baler twine. She brewed coffee on a camping stove in the old buttery and kept a saucer by the door for the mice, who never touched the biscuits. Most days nobody came. A retired surveyor visited on Tuesdays to borrow maps he never returned. Nell kept a ledger of what people read, and she noticed that the books were always put back in the wrong order, carefully, as if by someone who wanted to be found.

On the first cold morning of October, the wrong order had a pattern. One unfinished history had been moved to the window seat, volume after volume, each spine turned outwards with a bookmark standing at the same page. Nell sat down with her cup going cold beside her and began to read where the marks were. By noon she had got through three hundred pages, and in the margin of the last one someone had pencilled a line about a couple who walked to the library day after day.

She found the pencil in the seat cushion and wrote beneath it, in her own careful hand, that they read page after page after page. Then she set a second cup and a clean saucer on the sill and went home to Thrushgill without locking the gate.