Realistic shaded tattoo of stacked books, an open book and a quill with script above, placed on the outer thigh.

Stacked books, quill and script on a thigh

Realism · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A shaded realistic tattoo of a stack of hardbound books with a bookmark ribbon, one book marked 221B, and an open book with a quill pen at its base. Script above and below the books reads All that is gold does not glitter, and one open page carries the word BADWOLF and a pentagram-style symbol. The books use grey shading with muted brown tones on the covers, and the photo is taken straight on against plain skin.

Realism Lettering Thigh Book Open book Quill Feather Script Quote Pentagram

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The crate came aboard at Valparaíso with its nails already drawn, and Mr Okafor, who kept the purser's ledger and everything else on the ship that could be counted, blamed the stevedores. I blamed nobody. I was the ship's librarian in name only, which gave me a key to the saloon bookcase and the right to be ignored at dinner, so when the crate was carried to my cabin for safekeeping I was glad of the company.

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Inside lay forty-one volumes, their calf covers gone the colour of strong tea, each with a ribbon trailing from the spine. Most were almanacs of tides and star positions. On the flyleaf of one someone had written a line from an old poem, All that is gold does not glitter, and in a margin further on the word BADWOLF appeared in capitals, crossed out, then written again beneath a small pentagram drawn with great care. I read for three nights and learned only that the author had distrusted gold and loved lamplight.

On the fourth night the bell struck twice in the wrong place, and I found a card tucked into the last volume bearing the number 221B and an address in Gower Street that had been torn away. Beside it lay a quill, its nib still damp, though my cabin had been locked since Valparaíso. Mr Okafor, when I showed him, said the manifest listed no passenger and no cargo that could write.

I did not sleep. Before dawn I wrapped the quill in a page of the almanac and dropped it over the rail off the Falklands, and the sea took it without ceremony. When I returned to my table a fresh ribbon lay across the page I had been reading, marking a line I had never seen before, written in a hand as fine as frost on glass.