Traditional style tattoo of a stack of books with an eye on the cover and a yellow banner reading NERD LIFE, on the upper arm.

Stacked books with an eye and NERD LIFE banner

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A stack of three books sits at the centre, with an open eye on the top cover and a red bookmark ribbon hanging from the bottom. A yellow banner wrapped around the books reads NERD LIFE in black capitals, and black radiating lines surround the design. Bold black outlines and grey shading on the books contrast with the yellow, red and skin-toned background.

Traditional Upper arm Book Eye Banner Text Sunburst

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Maureen left the donated paperbacks on the trolley by the nurses' station at ten past two, the way she always did, with a note under the top one: TAKE ONE, BRING ONE, DON'T TELL THE TRUST. I took the fattest, a battered hardback with an open eye printed on the front and a red ribbon hanging out of the bottom like a tongue. Nobody had written in it, which I liked. Books with a previous owner's pencil in the margins always felt like being watched by someone who'd got there first.

Keep reading

I read it in the staff kitchen between obs rounds, a cheese sandwich going cold beside me. The story was about a lighthouse keeper who logs every ship that passes, and the eye on the cover, I decided, was the lamp. By half three I had reached the part where the keeper stops writing names and starts drawing them, and I was so absorbed that I didn't hear the buzzer from bay four until it had gone three times.

Mr Ellery was awake, sitting up with his hands folded on the blanket. He had been a signalman on the Settle line for forty years and still kept time by the rhythm of the ward lights. "What's that you've got?" he asked. I held up the book. He squinted at the eye and said, "That's the one who sees you coming, that is," and laughed until he coughed.

I went back to the kitchen afterwards and turned to the page where the ribbon was. It was the last chapter, and the keeper had written a single line in his log: Light seen, nothing answered. I wrote the date beside it in pencil, then put the ribbon back exactly where it had been and left the book for whoever Maureen brought in next.