Large abstract back tattoo in black ink and red splashes, showing a vinyl record, turntable, bare tree and the word turn, placed across the back and side of the torso.

Abstract turntable and tree back piece

Back · Mixed · Photo

A large back piece shows a vinyl record and turntable tonearm, a bare tree silhouette, and the words turn and listen written in loose lettering. The linework is loose and sketchy, with soft black grey shading and sprays of ink. Bold red splashes run diagonally across the composition, behind and across the black elements.

Back Tree Splatter Lettering Music

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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

You are twenty-two and the only one aboard the Mary Ellen who can splice a warp and still keep time. Every night the old wireless gives out somewhere past the Humber, and Dennis, who is skipper and therefore never wrong, lays his palm on the wheelhouse ledge and says the sea has got into the valves again. What has got in is the record player bolted beside the chart table, a turntable with a brass arm that the last owner won at cards in Grimsby.

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Tonight the spindle is slow and the record is Hank's, scratched near the run-out groove where somebody's thumb has been. You lift the arm and set the needle, and the galley comes up through the deck: the cook's laugh, the diesel knock, rain ticking on the glass like a second needle. Dennis turns his back and says turn it over, and you do, because that is the rule of the boat. Turn it. Listen.

The coast has gone to a black line and a smear of lamps. Out here there are no trees at all, only the bare pole of the mast with its navigation light, and the fleet strung across the swell in the dark. The hulls are painted red so the other boats can find them, and in the lamplight the paint runs down the waves in long stripes. You watch the needle ride the groove and think of your sister in Hull, who will have the same song on her own machine with the same scratch in it.

At four bells the sea goes flat as a plate. Dennis calls you up for coffee and says leave the arm where it is, we'll hear the end in the morning. You leave it. The record turns on in the empty wheelhouse, a touch faster than it should, and the last bar goes out through the hull into the cold water, loud enough for the whole fleet to hear.