Watercolour style tattoo of stacked books, an open book and flying birds on a forearm, with rainbow colour washes and black linework.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stacked books, open book and birds on a forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A stack of books with rainbow-coloured spines sits at the lower left, with an open book beside it and a flock of birds rising from its pages toward the upper right. The black linework and shading define the books and birds, while loose watercolour washes in purple, blue, green, yellow and red spread across the skin behind them. The composition runs diagonally along the limb, with the bright colour fading out toward the edges.

Forearm Book Open book Bird Flock Watercolour Rainbow Splashes

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ada, The crate of books came aboard at Valparaíso smelling of damp cellars and somebody's pipe tobacco, and I have spent three nights sorting them on the chart table because the captain will not let anyone near the wheelhouse with a cup of tea. Most are the sort of thing sailors read once and leave on the mess table: adventure yarns with the covers gone, a Bradshaw, a Spanish dictionary with the Ns chewed. But at the bottom was a stack of picture books, tied with twine, their spines painted every colour a sunset manages before it goes grey.

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I should tell you what happened on Tuesday. The weather had been brown for a week, the sea the colour of stewed tea, and Mr Okonedo, who mends the pumps and says little, sat down beside me with a book he had pulled from the stack. He opened it on his knee and began reading aloud. It was about a gull who wanted to see the far side of a harbour wall. He read badly, stopping to sound out the long words, and by the third page the lamp had turned yellow and the whole mess had gone quiet to listen.

When he closed it, a wash of blue had risen off the page like breath on glass. Out of the gutter fluttered one bird, then three, then a flock that circled the lamp and went up through the skylight into the dark. Nobody spoke. Okonedo tucked the empty book under his arm and said the pages were lighter than he expected. I have kept the rest of the stack in my cabin since. I read one a night, and each morning there are fewer spines and more feathers on the deck.

Write and tell me what the gulls do over the Thames. I am keeping the last one for you, the green one, which has not yet decided whether it is a book or a bird.