Small grey open book tattoo with outlined pages and light shading on the back of a heel near the ankle.

Small open book tattoo on the heel

Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A small open book is outlined in dark grey linework, with its pages drawn as stacked lines and light grey shading. The tattoo sits on the side of a heel, and the skin is shown in a close view against a red background. The design uses only black and grey ink.

Ankle Book Open 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

The rain has been coming sideways across the Saturday market since eight, and the tarpaulins over the book stalls sag like wet sails. You have been stacking paperbacks into a plastic crate for an hour, their spines swelling, their corners curling. Mrs Okonedo at the next pitch calls across that nobody buys novels in weather like this, and you tell her the weather is the only reason anybody reads at all.

Keep reading

A boy of about nine stops at your trestle with a damp coin clenched in his fist. He wants the one with the ship on the cover, but it costs more than he has, so you ask what he has already read. He lists them carefully, one by one, and you find him a copy with a lighthouse on the front, its page edges foxed brown like old toast. You tell him the pages turn easier if he licks a finger first. He does, and grins as if you have handed him a secret.

When the rain thins to a grey mist and the gutters run like little rivers, you lift the last book from the crate. Inside the back cover, in faded pencil, someone has written a name, a town, and a date from long before you were born. Beneath it is a single line: keep going, the second half is better. You read the line twice, then pick up your pencil, write your own name underneath, and set the book face up on the stall, open to the wind, for whoever comes next.