Traditional style colour tattoo on a forearm showing a stack of strapped books with red roses, a small red flower and green leaves.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stack of books and roses on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A stack of three or four books bound with a leather strap sits in the centre, flanked by a red rose with a yellow centre above and below it. Green leaves, a small five-petalled red flower and fine black scrolling tendrils fill the space around the motif. Bold black outlines, solid red, yellow, green and grey shading and a bold, even composition are typical of the traditional style.

Traditional Botanical Forearm Book Rose Flower Leaves Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The crate came up the rock on the last boat before the autumn gales, strapped shut with a belt of cracked brown leather and addressed to the lighthouse in a hand I did not know. Inside, wrapped in oilcloth, were four books of different heights, their spines faded to the colour of weak tea. My sister Ruth had folded a note into the top volume. It said only to read the red one first, and not to argue with her, Eilidh.

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I did not read the red one first. I had the wick to trim, the lens to rub with chamois, and a cough that had settled in my chest like a lodger. But the books kept falling open at the same place, as if the damp had warped them towards it. Pressed between the pages were rose petals gone brittle as onion skin, and beside them a column of figures in a hand that leant hard to the right, the way mine does when I am tired.

The figures were not tide times. They were the log of a keeper called Walter Frew, who had lit this lamp in 1887 on the night the Marguerite broke on the Skerry. He wrote that the wind had told him to leave the light dark, and that he had lit it anyway, because the sea does not care what a man thinks he hears. Under his last line, someone had drawn a small red flower with five petals and written beside it: still burning.

I sat on the stool until the sky went from grey to black. Then I pulled the strap tight around the four books, buckled it, and set them on the sill where the beam sweeps past every twenty seconds. Ruth had been right about the red one. I rang her from the mainland office the next morning and told her so, and for Ruth not to gloat is a kind of miracle.