Small black fine line tattoo of a scrolled infinity symbol with a small square in the centre, on the inner wrist.

Scrolled infinity symbol on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small black tattoo of an infinity-style figure sits on the inner wrist, with a curled scroll at each end and a small rectangular block at the centre. The outlines are thin and even, with no shading, and the ink is solid black. The hand is open and turned slightly, with a ring visible on a finger at the top left and a plain background at the right.

Fine line Geometric Forearm Infinity Scroll Square Symbol

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Ashworth had bound books for thirty-one years before he let anyone else touch the press, and even then he stood at the boy's elbow the whole afternoon, saying nothing but tapping the bench whenever the thread strayed. The boy, Tom Greaves, was fourteen and believed the stamp on the back board was a mark of ownership, a little brass die that made every volume a proper thing. It was the only tool Ashworth would never clean himself.

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"Wind it again," Ashworth said. "Twice round the square, then out to the scroll, then back. You're not closing a book. You're making a loop that never runs out."

Tom asked why a bookbinder needed a symbol that went round forever, when the books themselves would not last a century. Ashworth pulled a ledger from the shelf, a sewn record of a cotton warehouse on Mill Street, and showed him the stitching that had held for seventy years. "Nothing lasts," he said, "but a well-sewn spine will outlive the hands that sewed it, and that is near enough."

The turn came in spring, when Ashworth's own hands shook too much to hold the awl. He handed Tom the bench and the die, and when the first commission went out to a widow on Kirkgate, Tom stamped the board with the loop and the square and felt the press give under his palm. Weeks later the book came back for rebinding. The widow had read it to pieces, which Ashworth said was the only compliment a binder ever really gets.