In literature, "parchment" is often invoked as a color—a muted, aged yellowish or brown tone that evokes the patina of time. Authors use the term to describe not only objects but also the complexion and landscape, suggesting antiquity and weathered character. For instance, a "parchment‐coloured morass" is used to lend an atmosphere of decay and dryness to a setting ([1]), while characters are described as having skin "tanned to parchment colour" or "like parchment yellowed with age" ([2], [3]). Similarly, faces are compared to parchment—sometimes as "yellow as parchment" ([4]) or bearing that “dirty parchment” hue ([5])—infusing the imagery with a sense of enduring wear and fragility. This subtle, weathered tone, echoed in descriptions of brown, timeworn surfaces ([6], [7], [8]), underscores a literary aesthetic that marries the visual with the historical.
- Anon the exorcism changes to a noise like that affected by ostlers as they tend their charges, and the lake has become a parchment-coloured morass.
— from An Ocean Tramp by William McFee
- They were rough looking fellows, one red-haired and red-bearded, the other hatchet-faced, but both with skins tanned to parchment colour.
— from Golden Face: A Tale of the Wild West by Bertram Mitford
- The fellow was strongly built with skin of a leathery appearance, like parchment yellowed with age.
— from Tarzan the Untamed by Edgar Rice Burroughs
- Their faces are yellow as parchment, and Time has written them so full of wrinkles that there is not room for another line.
— from Italian Journeys by William Dean Howells
- The moon had shone out of a sudden, and the light of it struck down on Dignum's face, and that was the colour of dirty parchment.
— from At a Winter's Fire by Bernard Edward Joseph Capes
- It is all as brown and bare as parchment for half the year.
— from Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 17, No. 099, March, 1876 by Various
- His face was wrinkled like a piece of wet shrivelled silk and his skin was the colour of parchment.
— from Madame Flirt
A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' by Charles Edward Pearce
- No genial influence could warm his sluggish blood, or impart a glow to his dry, parchment-colored face.
— from Eventide
A Series of Tales and Poems by Effie Afton