Black ink tattoo on a forearm showing a handwritten script quote above three open books with quill pens, in a line-drawn lettering style, placed on the inner forearm.

Quote and open books on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo runs down the forearm as three stacked open books, each with a quill or pen resting on or above its pages, separated by lines of cursive script. The linework is clean and even, with small hatched shading on the book pages and small ink flourish marks beside the pens. The design uses black ink only, set against pale skin and a plain white background.

Lettering Forearm Book Open book Quill Pen Script Quote Text

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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

You find the ledger under the cider press, its spine gone soft as bread, and the first entry is in your own hand, though you have never kept accounts in your life. Wasps drone over the windfalls in the long grass. There are forty trees, each with a name pencilled on a tin tag wired to its trunk: Bramley, Ashmead, the old Blenheim by the gate.

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The ledger records the yield in neat rows of small sums, but in the margins someone has written what the weather is doing. On Tuesday the wind took the top limb of the Ashmead and laid it across the lane. You walk out to look and find the limb exactly where the margin said it would be. You laugh, and then you stop laughing, because the ink beside the note is still wet and smells of crushed fruit.

You try to rub the line away with your thumb. The ink smears but does not lift. That evening the sky over the far hedge turns the colour of the page, and the pen in the kitchen drawer is warm, as though someone has only just set it down. You take it out and write that the gate at the bottom of the orchard is open. You walk down the lane in the dusk and the gate is standing wide, hinges rusted the way you described them, the latch hanging by a single bent nail.

You stand there a long while. Then you go back up the rows, counting trees under your breath, and the number is forty-one. You open the ledger on the cider press, dip the pen, and write one more name on a clean tag, because it seems only fair that the new tree should have a place in the book.