Black linework tattoo on a forearm of a stack of three books above the words I have lived a thousand lives, set in a typewriter-style font.

Stack of books with quote on forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A stack of three hardbound books with visible page edges and small strap details is drawn in thin black outline above the quote I have lived a thousand lives, written in a serif typewriter-style font. The linework is clean and even with light hatching on the page edges and no shading or colour. The tattoo is centred on the inner forearm against a plain pale skin background, with a dark padded surface visible behind the arm.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Book Stack of books Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The strap on the top ledger had perished, so Nell held the three of them together with both hands while Walter hunted in his drawer for the bone folder. The house clearance had been in Hessle, a terraced place that smelled of damp coats and marmalade, and the books had been stacked on the bottom shelf of an airing cupboard as if someone meant to come back for them.

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Inside the front board of the top volume, a typed slip had been pasted down, its letters gone the colour of weak tea: I have lived a thousand lives. Beneath it ran a column of titles and dates in pencil. Walter read them aloud with his glasses on the end of his nose. Dracula, 1961. The Moonstone, 1962. Middlemarch, twice. Nell turned the pages and found that every entry had a second column, a single word beside each one: stayed, left, cried, laughed.

"She kept score of her reading the way other people kept bank statements," Walter said, and Nell didn't like the way he said she, as if the woman might be in the next room. They spent the afternoon resewing the signatures of the middle book, Nell's awl going in and out of the old linen thread until her thumb ached and the light through the workshop window turned yellow.

At closing, when the shop bell had gone quiet, Nell opened the ledger to the first blank line after the last entry. She wrote a title she had read at fourteen, a date, and in the second column, the word began. Then she put the books back in their cupboard, squared the stack so the straps lay flat, and left the door ajar for whoever came next.