Ink by Alice Broadway

Every action, every deed, every significant moment is tattooed on your skin for ever. When Leora’s father dies, she is determined to see her father remembered forever. She knows he deserves to have all his tattoos removed and made into a Skin Book to stand as a record of his good life. But when she discovers that his ink has been edited and his book is incomplete, she wonders whether she ever knew him at all.

2 thoughts on “Ink by Alice Broadway

  1. The book Ink is written by Alice Broadway. It is about a society in which every member of their community is tattooed, in order for them to be remembered. Once they die, their skin is ‘flayed’ and made into a book, then it is judged on whether they deserve to be given to their ancestors or they should be burned. The antagonists of this book are the so called blanks. They are people who don’t get tattooed and are forgotten. Even babies who die before they are inked are forgotten.
    Leora has just completed her final exams, which determine what jobs she can do. But during her exams, an ancient tradition is brought back, public markings. They tattoo them with the crow, the mark of forgotten. During a flash back, Leora realised that her dad had been marked with a crow. The man who was marked in the square was jailed for stealing someone’s skin. Her fathers.
    Leora gets her dream job as an inker, only to find out to her dismay that her trainer, Obel, was one of her dad’s supporters. Her dad was the leader of a pro blanks and inked people society, which was started by the ‘white’ which thousands of years ago. Leora breaks into the government building to seize her dad’s skin in order to hide his forgotten symbol, but this turns out to be a set up by the government to test her loyalty to the blanks.
    Leora finds out during her dad’s funeral that her ‘mum’ is not her mum, but instead her mum is a blank. This makes her rebel against the people who had lied to her. This is why her first chosen tattoo was something shocking.
    A self picked crow covering her chest.
    I would highly recommend this book to anyone who likes fantasy dystopian books and also mystery and quite dark stories.
    I enjoyed the general plot.

  2. The ideas behind this book are quite surreal. The characters live in a different world to ours and the book does a really good job of explaining their society in an easy way to comprehend. The storyline is fast paced and new discoveries are made throughout the book to make it a gripping page turner. I found the deeper meaning of this book very interesting and it left me thinking for hours upon end about societary customs and the limits of free will in religion. DEFINITELY READ THIS BOOK1
    Zak, 13, Eltham College

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