Realistic black and grey thigh tattoo of a woman in a short dress reading an open book on a stack of books, with red shoes, a city skyline and the word Sanctuary beneath.

Woman reading on a stack of books with Sanctuary

Realism · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A woman in a short dress sits on a tall stack of books, reading an open book held in both hands, with one leg crossed over the other and small red shoes visible. Below the stack is a faint city skyline and the word Sanctuary in a serif lettering style. The shading is soft and detailed in grey and black, with only the shoes in red, and the design fills the thigh in a vertical composition.

Realism Thigh Woman Book Stack of books City skyline Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The salt came up the river in the spring of the long dry, and by midsummer the lower wards of Cassavel lay under a grey crust that cracked like ice when you walked on it. Old Hebe Ruskin kept the last lending room above the chandlers' row, and she had one rule: no book left the shelves for kindling, not even the damp ones, not even the ones with pages glued shut by mildew.

Keep reading

Her granddaughter Wren was nine and could not sit still. She climbed the reading ladder the way other children climbed trees, and one afternoon she found that the stack of volumes by the window, the Atlas of the Drowned Coasts and forty years of parish ledgers, had grown tall enough to lift her head above the sill. From up there she could see the far towers of the old city poking through the crust, and the carts coming up the causeway with their lanterns lit.

Hebe told her about the gate at the causeway's end, carved with letters nobody could read any more. The people who passed through it, her grandmother said, were the ones who could sit above the flood with a book open on their knees and not be afraid of the water. Wren asked what they read. Hebe said it did not matter, only that they kept reading, and that the stack must never come down.

When the carts came the next winter, the drivers wanted fuel and the lamps were low. Wren stood on the top volume in her red shoes, the one thing she owned that the salt had not spoiled, and opened the atlas to the page of drowned towns. She read the names aloud, slowly, one by one, until the drivers stopped at the foot of the stack to listen, and none of them climbed up.