Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a stack of books under an arched glass dome with stars and a ringed planet, on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stacked books in a glass dome on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A tall stack of books sits on a round base inside an arched dome, with a ringed planet and scattered stars in the sky above. Bold black outlines define the dome and books, while the night sky and the shaded spines are built from fine stippled dots. The design is entirely black and grey and fills the forearm in a centred, upright composition.

Dotwork Forearm Book Stack of books Star Planet Night sky

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By half past four the rain has found the gap under the tarpaulin again, and the Saturday crowd has thinned to people with dogs and nowhere to be. You are wrapping the last of the atlases in carrier bags when Mr Pell, who runs the clock stall three pitches down, shuffles over with a glass dome under one arm, the kind that once kept wedding cakes from the flies.

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"Nobody wants it," he says. "There's a hairline crack in the lip. Take it for a pound." Inside sits a round tin base and nothing else. You carry it home on the bus, and that night you stack the books you could never bring yourself to sell: the water-stained ghost stories, the field guide with your father's pencil in its margins, a cookery book with a split spine. The stack wobbles, then holds.

Then you do the thing you have been putting off. You switch off the lamp and look at the dome against the window, where the streetlight blurs through the wet glass, and you think of the sky over this town, which has never once been dark enough to show you its stars. So you paint them on the inside of the glass with white ink from a dead fountain pen, one dot at a time, the way old map-makers filled empty corners of the sea. A ringed planet takes the whole of a night. By dawn the dome holds a sky of its own, and the books beneath it look as though they have been keeping watch.

Next Saturday Mr Pell asks what you want for it. You tell him it isn't for sale. The rain starts again on the tarpaulin, loud and steady, and you stand among the damp paperbacks listening to it fall on a sky you made yourself.