Colour and black-and-grey neo-traditional tattoo on the outer thigh showing a figure in a leafy wreath among tall stylised trees with coloured orbs and books, with a small rose below.

Stylised forest and figure on a thigh

Dotwork · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a figure with a leafy wreath and a white collar, framed by tall, angular trees with thin black outlines. Floating above the trees are round orbs in teal, orange and mustard, and small open books are drawn among the trunks. Stippled dotwork shading fills the trees and the figure's dress, and a small red and green rose sits beneath the design near the knee.

Dotwork Neo-trad Thigh Figure Wreath Tree Book Orb Rose Leaves Forest

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lock keeper at Stoke Pell counted the crates twice before he would let the barge through, and Nell Varley let him, because he was right to be suspicious of a boat carrying nothing but books and a lantern with a cracked horn. Her father had carried coal on this cut. She carried paper now, the spoiled sort, sheets the printer in Market Dorrow had flooded and sold her for kindling at a penny the bundle.

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Tied up under the willows at dusk, she sorted them by how the damp had got into them. The ones with tide-lines she dried on the cabin roof and pressed flat under the coal scuttle. The ones with only foxing she read, because nobody had ever told her that foxing was a thing a book could be forgiven for. A book about the stars, half eaten. A cookery book with a recipe for eels crossed out in three hands. A ledger kept by a family who had lost their mill and went on writing the figures anyway.

On the third night the orbs came up off the water, pale as seed-heads, and drifted into the trees along the bank. She followed them with the lamp. Among the trunks, the spines of books had grown out of the bark with their covers open like hands, and a woman stood between them in a wreath of laurel, her white collar starched into fins, reading aloud from nothing. Nell did not ask her name. The woman tilted a page toward her and said, quite plainly, that the cut was longer than anyone wrote it.

Nell went back to the barge with the ledger under her arm, and at dawn she found that someone had added a column in neat red ink: every crate she had ever carried, the town each had been bound for, and a small rose drawn in the margin where the balance should go.