Shaded tattoo of a Sorting Hat resting on a stack of books, with grey hat and muted red book pages, on the outer foot.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sorting hat on a stack of books

Other · Mixed · Photo

A small tattoo shows a grey, shaded wizard's hat with a creased brim sitting on top of a stack of three books. The books have red-pink covers and pages with grey shading and outlines. The design is centred on pale skin with a soft, slightly blurred photograph taken at close range.

Other Book Stack of books

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada Pryce had been on the step stool since half past four, one hand on the spine of the parish atlas and the other pinning a grey felt hat to the top of a stack of ledgers, because the hat had started to sulk. It sat on the books with its brim curled down like a wet dog's ear and would not be shelved, however firmly she told it.

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"That's a sorting hat, Miss Pryce," said Walter Hinds from the doorway, turning his cap in his hands. He had come in to return a pamphlet on drainage and had stayed to watch. "My grandfather left it to the chapel. Says it puts folk where they belong, and it's never been wrong about a soul in this village."

Ada climbed down, dusted her palms on her skirt and lifted the hat. It was warm, which she did not expect, and it slid off the ledgers as if somebody had nudged it. The brim tipped toward the back shelves, toward the unclaimed books nobody had borrowed since the war, and it stopped at a slim notebook bound in red cloth with a blank spine.

"Well," Walter said. "That one's yours."

She opened the notebook. Its first page was empty, cream and faintly ruled, and she thought of the letters she had meant to write to her sister in Leeds for three winters running. She took the pencil from behind her ear and wrote the date at the top. When she looked up, the hat was back on the stack, brim drooping, as though it had finished its work and was content to wait for the next one.