Traditional style tattoo of an open red book with a gold spine and yellow flower on a teal ribbon, on a limb, with a partial green plant tattoo at the top left.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional open book with flower

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

A bold tattoo of an open book with a red cover, gold spine and decorative swirls, with a yellow flower and teal ribbon on the right page. The design uses thick black outlines and flat, solid colour fills in red, gold, yellow and teal, with a soft shadow along the lower edge of the book. A partial green plant tattoo appears at the top left of the frame, and the book is centred against a pale background.

Traditional Other Book Flower Ribbon Swirl Plant

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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

Come in out of the wet, the lot of you, and mind the puddle by the fish stall, it has swallowed better men than you. Right. Hear this one about the bookbinder's daughter, Maud Ferrier, who kept a stall under the iron roof of Tallow Street market where the rain drummed so hard the traders had to shout their prices. Nobody bought books in the rain, not in those days. They bought pies and boots.

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But Maud had one book she would not sell, a red-bound thing with a gold spine that her father had stitched the week before he died. Its pages stayed closed and dry no matter the weather, which is how you knew it was a proper book. Every evening she would open it on the counter, just a crack, and a yellow flower would be pressed flat between two leaves, bright as the day it was picked. The teal ribbon marking her place had never once slipped.

A boy came one wet Thursday asking for a book he could not pay for. Maud said she had nothing to give him but the one thing she was keeping. So she opened it wide for him, and the pages, which had been shut so long, turned all on their own towards the boy's face, and he read aloud the first line he saw, and the rain outside stopped mid-drip. Ask the fish man. He'll tell you. Every drop hung in the air until the boy finished the sentence, and then they all came down at once, as if nothing had happened at all.