Enlarged with AI from a smaller original
Open book with watercolour splashes
Upper arm · Colour · Photo
An open book with fanned pages is drawn in black linework, with the pages filled by grey shading and small marks. Loose splashes and brushstroke-like bands of teal, pink, purple and yellow spread outward behind and around the book. The design is centred on the frame against a blue fabric background.
Find an artist for thisTake 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
Dear Tomasz, the river came over the reading room sills on Tuesday, and by Thursday the spine of every atlas in the east stacks had swollen like bread. I have spent three days peeling wet pages apart with a bone folder and a hair dryer borrowed from the bursar, and I want you to know that some of them held.
Keep reading
Mrs Okafor's volume of Cornish hymns came out the colour of weak tea, the lettering gone, but when I fanned the leaves open on the blotter the margins were still full of her pencil. She had written 'sing it slower' beside every chorus. I could not bring myself to put it in the skip with the encyclopaedias.
Here is what I did. I laid each page between blotting paper, pressed them under the iron weights from the old card room, and when the stains bled into the paper I let them. The colour spread outward in bands the way paint does on a damp wall, teal and violet and the yellow of old candle wax, and the black lines of the pages stayed sharp at the edges. It looks nothing like a book now. It looks like weather. Mrs Okafor came to see it today, laughed, then cried a little, and said it was the first time the hymnal had looked like it had been somewhere.
Keep the bone folder for me. I will post you the book once it is dry, and you can tell me whether the pencil survived.
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