Black ink tattoo across the upper back with the words books are proof humans can do magic, flying birds, a triangle with a circle and line, and a trident.

Quote, birds and symbols across upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink tattoo sits across the upper back, with a silhouetted bird and four smaller birds trailing diagonally above a centred line of serif lettering that reads books are proof humans can do magic. A solid outlined triangle containing a circle and vertical line sits to the left, and a bold trident shape to the right. The work uses solid black ink with no shading or colour, and the photograph is taken close up from behind.

Lettering Back Bird Quote Text Circle Trident Book

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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

Mrs Odile Prentice had run the bindery on Tanners Lane for forty-one years, and in that time she had never let a customer walk out with a book they had not asked for. So when a grey-coated man came in on a wet Thursday asking for "the one with the three-sided door," she set down her awl and looked at him properly.

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He unfolded a sketch on the counter: a triangle, a ring inside it, and a single stroke running straight through the ring. Odile knew the mark. Her father had cut it into a brass plate for the old press, and the plate had gone missing the winter the river froze. She said nothing. She took the lamp to the back shelves, where the spoiled sheets lay under a tarpaulin, and lifted out a book with no title and boards warped like driftwood.

Inside, one page had been folded so many times that the crease had gone white. A girl in a lamplighter's coat wrote one sentence a night, and each time she finished it a bird rose from the ink and flew out of the window toward the harbour. Five birds in all, the last one the largest, and by the final page the window was empty and the girl had gone out after them. Odile had read it as a child and forgotten it, the way you forget a word that was once on the tip of your tongue.

The man paid in coins worn smooth. Odile wrapped the book in brown paper, then stopped with the string in her hands. On the blank endpaper, in a hand she did not recognise as her own, someone had begun a new line. She dipped her pen, wrote the next word, and heard wings beat against the glass.