Black and grey traditional-style tattoo of a stack of three books with a moth on the top cover, placed on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stacked books on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A pile of three books is shown with a moth motif on the top cover and lettering-like marks on the middle book's spine. Bold outlines and shaded hatching give the books volume against plain skin. The tattoo is rendered only in black and grey inks, centred on the forearm in a close, square crop.

Traditional Forearm Book Stack of books Moth

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Harrowgate Mill could say when the dance hall had stopped being a dance hall. The sprung floor still had its chalk lines for the quadrilles, but shelves ran up the walls to the rafters, and old Mrs Pell sat at the door with a ledger and a biscuit tin for pennies. Most borrowers paid in coins. A few were visited by the moth, a grey thing the size of a palm that came down from the beams and settled on whatever book they had chosen. Those ones took that book home and kept it a year.

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Tom Ashby was nineteen and did not believe a word of it. He chose a stack of three from the long table, a red almanac, a hymn book and a water-stained atlas, and when he set them on the bench to pay, the moth dropped onto the top cover and stayed. He laughed and carried the books out into the rain anyway. By the time he reached the lane the cover had gone soft under his palm, warm as a pulse.

The year went the way the old stories said. He read the almanac by lamplight and learned the hymns until he could sing them on the bus. The atlas was full of towns on no map he had ever seen, and the marks down the middle spine began to look like names, some of them people he had known. Each month the moth on the cover spread its wings a little wider.

On the anniversary he carried the stack back up the lane. The moth lifted off the cover, circled the rafters once, and was gone. Mrs Pell opened the middle book, ran a finger down the spine and read it aloud. "Your name's there, love, and a date beside it." She closed the book and looked at him over her glasses. "Now you'll want to take the next one."