Traditional style tattoo of a stack of books with banners reading I'VE LIVED A THOUSAND LIVES, placed on the top of a foot.

Stacked books and banners on a foot

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

A bold tattoo of a stack of four books, with red, orange, yellow and green spines and dark outlines, sits on the top of a foot. Two curling banners wrap around the books, with the words I'VE LIVED A THOUSAND LIVES in black capitals. The solid outlines and flat colour fills are typical of traditional tattooing, and the design is centred across the foot against a plain light background.

Traditional Lettering Other Book Banner Ribbon Text Stack of books

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit where the flour won't reach you, she said, and nobody argued, because Mrs Pellow only told stories while the first trays were still hot and the street outside was the colour of wet slate. The ovens had been lit since three. The back room smelled of scorched sugar and yeast, and the lad in the blue apron kept dropping his scraper on the tiles.

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Her grandfather kept four books stacked on a crate by the kitchen door, their spines the colours of a fire going down: oxblood, ochre, mustard and a green gone black with handling. Every Sunday he pulled one down, blew the dust off the top edge and said he had lived it already. Lived a thousand lives, he said, and he was only sixty-one. The family thought he was daft. He had been a ship's cook at Hull, a bus conductor in Bradford, a man who dug drains for the council and a man who sold lace door to door in Keighley. Each of those men had left a line in pencil on the flyleaf, and she still knew the handwriting better than her own.

When he died, the ribbon he used as a bookmark was found wedged in the bread bin, folded small, with a single word on it in his neat capitals: ENOUGH. Mrs Pellow never said what she made of that. She only tapped the crate with one floury finger and told the lad to fetch the peel.

Then she slid it under the first loaf, and the crust gave with a small sound, like a spine being opened for the first time.