Traditional style colour tattoo on a calf of stacked books, pink flowers and a banner reading We Are All Stories In The End.

Stacked books and banner on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Colour · Photo

A stack of books in orange, teal and red sits at the centre, framed by two curved banners and three pink five-petal flowers with dark green leaves. The bold black outlines and flat fills are typical of traditional American tattooing, with red shading behind the design. The banner text is clearly legible and the photo shows the tattoo on a bare calf against a plain background.

Traditional Calf Book Banner Flower Leaves Quote Text

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The crate smells of wet cardboard and pipe tobacco, and the orange-spined paperback on top has swollen to twice its width. You lift it out with two fingers, the way Mr Halloran taught you, and water runs off the board in a thin line onto the workbench.

Keep reading

Nobody comes to the bindery after eleven. The radiator ticks against the wall while a night bus sighs past on the Commercial Road, its windows lit and empty. You work through the stack under the lamp: a teal atlas with foxed corners, a red hymnal, a ledger with three pressed pink flowers laid between its pages like bookmarks that someone forgot to collect. Each one has been kept for a reason you will never learn.

Inside the back board of the atlas, in pencil gone silver with age, someone has written a name, Ada Brennan, and a date from 1952, and below it, in a looser hand: 'Keep going, we are all stories in the end.' You read it twice, then once more with the lamp angled close, as though the words might rearrange themselves into something you could file.

You glue the spine, dry the boards between two heavy dictionaries, and press the flowers back where you found them. Then you write the catalogue card in your neatest capitals, the way Ada would have wanted, and slide it into the atlas before the shelf in the morning takes it back.