Colour tattoo of a diagonal stack of five books with bright covers and cream page edges on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stack of coloured books on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A diagonal stack of five hardback books is drawn in three-dimensional perspective, each with a different cover colour including brick red, orange, yellow, teal, black and bright blue, and cream page edges. The shading is soft and the outlines are minimal, so the colour blocks carry the form. The design sits centred on the inner forearm against a blurred indoor background.

Forearm Book

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Frost had furred the inside of the kitchen window again by the time Mags came down, and the stack was exactly where Tom had left it, propped against the flour bin as if it had been waiting for someone to ask it a question. He had carried the books up from the carrier's van the week before Christmas, five hardbacks tied with baler twine, and nobody had untied them since.

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The bottom one was brick red, its spine cracked white at the middle, its cover picked out with a ferry that went nowhere near the farm. Above it sat the orange, then the mustard yellow with soft corners, then the teal, then the black, and at the very top the bright blue one, which was the one she had been avoiding. Their father had bought the lot at the Saturday auction in a box marked sundry, paying a few pounds for something he never opened, and then he had died in October before the frost came, which he would have called bad timing.

She eased the blue one free and the whole stack leaned, slow as cattle settling against a gate, then held. Inside the front board, in pencil, someone had written: For Mags, when the snow comes, read the good bit out loud. There had never been a good bit that she knew of. She sat down at the table, the range ticking, the dog asleep on the coal scuttle, and opened it at the first page.

Outside the snow came down on the yard in straight, patient lines, filling the tractor ruts until the gate was the only thing left standing. By the time she reached the end of the chapter the stack had not moved at all, and the blue cover sat on top of it catching the lamplight like something that had decided to stay.