Close photograph of a small fine black serif word, rêveur, tattooed on the upper arm, with the framed collage showing a book spine and an old printed page.

Rêveur lettering on upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A framed collage of three sepia photographs: the spine of a book titled The Night Circus, a printed page reading Rêveurs 1891-1892, and a close view of a small tattooed word. The tattoo is thin black lettering in a serif italic, placed on the inner upper arm with part of the shoulder visible. The palette is sepia and grey with no colour ink.

Lettering Fine line Upper arm Word Book

Find an artist for this

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 are the only one still climbing to the east tower of Hallowmere Castle with a bone folder in your coat pocket. The damp has got into the library, and the pages have bloomed together into a grey brick the county would rather write off. Mr Tennant wants a quote, not a rescue. You bring a kettle, a scalpel and a flask of weak tea anyway, and you start at the edge, where the paper still lifts.

Keep reading

Most of the volume is ledgers: rent, coal, a cook's wages in a crabbed hand. Then, near the spine, you find a printed sheet folded twice, its type as crisp as the day it was pressed. Rêveurs, it says, with a date range beneath, 1891 to 1892, and a line of heavy black capitals beginning with H. In the margin someone has written in pencil: keep the dreamers warm. You read it three times, because nobody keeps a programme for a dream unless they expected to wake.

The sheet comes away whole, which should not happen. You fold it into your notebook the way you would handle a stopped clock, and when you look up the window has gone the colour of stewed tea. Below, in the courtyard, people in long coats stand in rows, silent, as if waiting for a tent flap to lift. You count them. You stop at forty, because one of them raises a hand, and you realise you are holding your pencil the same way.

You take the stairs down slowly, the notebook warm against your ribs. In the hall you tell Mr Tennant the volume is beyond saving. It is not beyond remembering, and you have the page to prove it.