Black and grey tattoo of a stack of books on the outer upper arm of a person in a blue top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stacked books on an upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A tattoo of a stack of three or four books sits on the outer upper arm, drawn with dark outlines and grey shading to suggest spines and page edges. The ink is mostly black and grey, with the skin tone and bright lighting giving the image a warm cast. The arm is cropped from the shoulder to the elbow against a blue sleeve and a blue patterned skirt, with the tattoo placed centrally in the frame.

Upper arm Book

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

On the island of Harrow Skerry the schoolmaster kept every book the boats brought in, because the boats came rarely and the books came from drowned men's chests and from the sea itself, swollen and salt-white. He stacked them by the stove in the schoolroom, three or four high, spines out, and told the children that a stack of books was a ladder with the rungs taken out, so you had to climb it by reading.

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In the hard winter the sea came over the breakwater and took the lower shelf. Mairi Gunn, who was eleven and sulky about it, carried the wet volumes up the brae in her apron to dry them in the church loft. Nobody had asked her. The minister's wife said the books were ruined and the child should leave them be. Mairi laid them out on the pews in a row, pages fanned open like gills, and sat with them until the light went.

In spring the schoolmaster found her asleep across the pews with a book open on her chest, and he did not wake her. He carried the damp stacks down to the stove one by one, and in the morning every book was dry and in order, though none of the island's children had a key to the loft and the latch had been rusted shut for years. Mairi said the books had dried themselves, which was the first thing she had ever said that made the minister go quiet.

The bottom book kept its tide-line for the rest of its life, a grey stain like a shore drawn in pencil. Whenever a new child climbed the stack by the stove, the schoolmaster made them put a finger on that line before they reached for the next volume.