Traditional colour tattoo of a stack of books, red roses and green leaves, with a banner reading I've lived a thousand lives, on a forearm.

Stacked books and roses with a banner

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a stack of books wrapped by two cream banners, one reading "I've lived a" and the other "thousand lives." Two red roses with green leaves sit on either side of the books. Bold black outlines frame solid colour fills in red, green, olive and cream, with soft red shading behind the design, and the motif is arranged centrally across the forearm.

Traditional Forearm Book Banner Text Rose Leaves Stack of books

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The officer has your crate open on the steel counter before you finish explaining it, and he lifts the top book out the way you'd lift a sleeping cat, two fingers under the spine. He turns the pages without reading them. A sea atlas with coffee rings over the Azores. A grammar of a language spoken by eleven people in a valley you have visited twice. A cookbook with a pressed fig leaf wedged in the gutter. Forty-one books in all, and every one has a faded red ribbon tied to its spine, because you tied them there yourself, one at each sale, so you would remember which ones you had already finished.

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"Occupation?" he asks, without looking up. "Bookseller," you say. "Mostly I take things back to the people who lost them." He writes this down in a hand so neat it seems to belong to someone else. "And these are for resale?"

"No. They're for keeping. I've lived a thousand lives, and every one of them needed something to read on the train."

He sets the atlas down on top of the stack and taps the declaration form with his pen. The brass scales settle under the crate with a small, reasonable clunk. He writes across the box in capitals: BOOKS, FORTY-ONE, LIVES UNCERTAIN. Then he stamps it twice, hard, and slides the form back toward you.

Behind you the barrier lifts. You close the crate, rest your hand on the red ribbon of the top volume, and drive on into the other country, where the road bends past a field of poppies and a grey church with a door that has never once been locked.