Fine grey outline tattoo of a vertical stack of books running down the inner forearm, against a red patterned fabric background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stacked book outline on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A vertical column of stacked, outlined shapes resembling books or ribbed segments runs down the forearm, with a small detail at the top. The linework is thin and mostly grey, with light shading inside the shapes and the skin showing through. The tattoo sits centrally in the frame against warm red and patterned fabric.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Our library was three shelves of donated books at the back of the Miners' Welfare, and my brother Tom had read every one of them by the time he went down Ashworth pit at fifteen. He came up each evening grey to the eyes, and I'd find him at the kitchen table with a volume propped against the teapot, lips moving over the words. The stack on our dresser grew by a book a week: a dictionary at the bottom, a Dickens with its spine cracked, a seed catalogue nobody had asked for.

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In the wet March of '58 the Welfare cellar flooded and the shelves went under. Tom carried what he could up the hill in a coal sack and laid the sodden volumes on our back step to dry, pages fanned out like gills. By Sunday he had built a tower taller than himself, each book squared to the one beneath, and half the street came to look at it and shake their heads at the waste.

Tom left the pit for the railway that summer, and the books stayed on our dresser. When Ashworth closed in '84 I packed the stack into a coal crate and carried it to the city library on the bus, one arm around it the whole way.

The librarian asked for names. I opened the dictionary and found Tom's, pencilled on the flyleaf in careful capitals, and she said the book could go back on the shelf under his name. I set the stack on her counter, bottom to top, exactly as he had laid it on the step.

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