Tooled leather is leather with a pattern pressed or cut into its surface. A worker lays the design on the damp leather and works it with metal tools — hammering, pressing, cutting shallow lines — so the picture stands up from the skin and you can feel it with your fingers. You see it on cowboy boots, belts, saddles, handbags and the covers of old books. The word almost always sits in front of the noun: a tooled belt, a hand-tooled saddle, a book bound in tooled leather. It carries a good feeling with it, the feeling of slow careful work done by a person rather than a machine, which is why shops like to put 'hand-tooled' on a price label. When gold leaf is pressed into the cut lines, especially on book covers, people say gold-tooled or tooled in gold. Do not let the word confuse you elsewhere: tooled is also the plain past form of the verb tool, and 'a factory tooled for making car parts' means it has been fitted with the machines it needs — a different picture entirely, and one you meet in business writing.