Black and grey sketch-style tattoo of a stack of books and an open book on the inside of a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stacked and open books on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A forearm carries two book designs: a stack of three hardcover books on the left and an open book with fanned pages on the right. The linework is soft and pencil-like, with grey shading along the spines, page edges and cover corners to create depth. The subject is shown in close crop against a white background with a printed ruler along the bottom edge.

Forearm Book Open book

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tin under Maud Penhallow's stairs had not been opened since the spring the Kittiwake went down, and the lid had rusted fast to the body of it. The women of Skerrow Bay kept their men's letters in that tin, and nobody had the heart to force it, so it sat there under the coal sacks like a sealed mouth.

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Maud worked a knife round the seam with oil and a rag until the lid gave with a crack. Inside were no letters at all. There were three books, stacked the way her father stacked his ledgers, each one swollen with damp, the boards gone soft as bread. The top one had a brass clasp gone green. She carried them to the window where the light off the water could reach them, and read the first line aloud to nobody. It was a list of tides in her father's square hand, one for every day of a year, and on the last page, written smaller, were the names of the boats that had come home that winter.

The old people said the sea took what it was owed and gave back the rest, only later and in pieces. Maud sat with the stack on her knee until the gulls had finished quarrelling over the fish boxes. Then she went down to the harbour with the loose book under her arm, the one whose pages had been fanned open by years of weather, and she read the tide table out across the water to the boats coming in, so every skipper heard the hour he was due.

The tin stayed open after that. Nobody in Skerrow Bay ever shut it again, and the tides, when they came, came on time.