Black and grey tattoo of a stack of books topped with a scroll, with two rolled pages below and the words I have lived a thousand lives above, on the ribs.

Stacked books and quote on ribs

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A stack of three hardbound books with a rolled scroll on top sits at the centre of the design, with two loose rolled pages beneath. The books are shaded in soft greys with fine hatched linework and highlights on the spines and bands. The words I have lived a thousand lives are set in a serif typeface above the illustration, against a pale skin background with a red garment at the top of the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Thirty-one years after the schoolhouse at Amber Cross shut its doors, the children came back for the reunion, and they came carrying books. Nobody had asked them to. Mrs Ottoline Breck, who had taught them their letters with a cane she never once used, had been dead a year, and her sister Hester had put the chairs out in the village hall anyway.

Keep reading

Each of them told the same story when the kettle went on. Mrs Breck used to say that a person could live a thousand lives if they read enough, one life for every life set down in a book, and that a child who finished a shelf had earned the right to be somebody else for an afternoon. The men who went down to the mill and the girls who went to sea laughed at this, then went quiet, because each of them could name the book that had carried them through a bad winter.

Hester brought down the tin box from the cupboard under the stage. Inside, rolled tight and tied with grey ribbon, were the pages the teacher had cut from old almanacs and sealed for every pupil who had ever asked what came after the last line. Tom Ashby, who had once hidden a stolen primer under his jumper, unrolled his and read it aloud. It said only: Keep going. You have a long way to read.

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