Black and grey tattoo of a row of upright books with shaded spines on the inner forearm, shown in three photographs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Row of books on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a row of upright books of varying heights and widths, drawn with bold black outlines and sitting on a straight baseline. The spines are shaded with grey tones and some are filled in darker, giving depth without colour. The collage shows three views of the same forearm piece, with a close crop, a side angle and a wider shot of the arm.

Forearm Book Spine

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

Mind the fire, child, it spits when the damp gets into the peat. Sit where the smoke goes past you. That is where the old ones sat for the tale of the Shelf at Greave Mill, and I will tell it the way it was told to me, with the pauses kept in.

Keep reading

Nine books stood on the mill's north wall, leaning on one another like drunk men at a wake. Nobody read them. Nobody in Greave could read by then, not since the long winter when the lamp oil ran out and the letters went with the ink. But they kept the shelf dusted, because a shelf is a promise that someone once knew what came next. The tallest book had a green spine gone white at the crown. The fattest had a red one, cracked like a riverbed in August.

Then came the year a stranger walked up from the coast with a satchel and no shoes. Her name was Tamsin Rooke, and she could read. She sat on the mill step for three days with the red book open on her knee, and on the third she began to weep, and the whole village gathered, because a grown woman crying over paper was a thing none of them had seen. She said the book was empty. Every page. She had been hunting for its ending for years, from one shelf to the next, across the salt flats.

So the people of Greave took the nine spines down and carried them to the square, and the children each chose one and wrote on it in charcoal whatever they thought came after the last word they remembered. Ask me the ending, child. I will tell you it is the one you give the red book, and you will not know what it is until you are holding it.