Colour tattoo of blue and red open books and small hearts above the words the world was hers for the reading in black script on the shoulder.

Open books and reading quote on the shoulder

Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows several open and closed books in blue, red and brown, scattered in a loose arc with a few small hearts between them. Below them, the words "the world was hers for the reading" run in black lowercase script. The books have thin dark outlines with light shading, and the lettering is crisp and even against the skin.

Shoulder Book Open book Heart Quote Script

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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 down, sit down, the guard will not look at you twice if you look at the bench instead. You want to know how Marta got the books over the river? I will tell you, but hold the lamp steady, because the story is a slow one and the lamp goes out if you fidget.

Keep reading

The customs hut at Vrba had one clerk, a man called Oskar who had not opened a book since his mother died. Marta carried six of them in a hatbox: a blue one with a cracked spine, a red one with gold letters worn off, a brown one no bigger than a matchbox that her grandfather had sewn shut with fishing line. Each time Oskar lifted the lid, she began to read aloud, very quietly, from whichever book fell open. The sentences were so dull and tangled that his eyes slid off the page and onto the rain on the window.

Then one night the rain stopped, and Oskar asked her to finish the sentence. She did. He asked for the next one, and the next. By dawn the hatbox was empty, a stack of pages was tied with string under his desk, and Marta was across the water with nothing in her hands but a small red paper heart he had folded from a stamp sheet and pressed into her palm.

So when they ask you what the world was for, child, remember the clerk. After that night he lifted the lid every morning, and a page of the world came out of the box and into his hands, and nobody at Vrba ever again had to ask him to stop reading.