Traditional style tattoo of an open book with the words We're all stories in the end and two red flowers, on the ankle.

Open book with quote and red flowers on ankle

Traditional · Ankle · Mixed · Photo

The design shows an open book with grey pages, black outlines and a red ribbon marker across the pages. Two red flowers sit either side of the book, and the words WE'RE ALL STORIES IN THE END are set in black lettering around it. Bold black outlines and flat fills give it a classic flash look, with red as the main accent against the grey and black.

Traditional Ankle Book Flower Quote Lettering Ribbon

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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

Sit closer, the lot of you, the wind up here has teeth. No, Maud, the stone won't fall tonight. It has been falling since my grandmother's grandmother and still it hasn't finished. Now. The book on the lectern in the north tower, the one with a red silk ribbon sewn into its spine, belonged to a clerk called Aldous Penhallow, who had no talent for anything except keeping the castle accounts in order.

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One hard winter the duke's men came to burn the old rolls, every page that spoke of the flood, the siege, and the gate that opened for the wrong king. Aldous hid the book under his coat and carried it through the snow to the chapel of the drowned saint, two frost-bitten brambles snagging his sleeves on the way. He stood at the gate and read aloud to the men until their torches guttered, telling them the story of their own grandfathers, their own fields, their own shame. By dawn they had forgotten what they came to burn.

The duke's men rode home ashamed of nothing, and Aldous grew old in that chapel with the book on his knees. When he died they found it open at the last page, the ribbon laid across a line someone had inked in the margin in a hand nobody here could name: we are all stories in the end. Some say he wrote it himself. Some say the book wrote him.

So when you lie awake and the wind comes whistling through the arrow slits, remember you are only a page the castle is still reading. Now off to bed, and mind the third stair. It has a story about feet.