Colour traditional-style tattoo of an accordion with pink flowers and gold scrollwork on the inner upper arm.

Accordion and pink flowers on an upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A colour tattoo of an accordion sits on the inner upper arm, with its keys and bellows shown in black, grey and brown. Three pink flowers with turquoise dots, a bud and green-gold scrollwork frame the instrument at its base and sides. Bold dark outlines and flat fills give the piece a classic, graphic look, and the design fills the frame against a plain light background.

Traditional Upper arm Flower Scrollwork Bud

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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

The accordion came to Marta's village on the back of a carter who had won it at cards, and nobody in Ashgrove could play it. For three market days it sat in the corner of the Blue Lamb with its bellows folded like a sleeping animal. Then the rain came sideways off the hill, and the stallholders packed their cloth and cabbages and crowded under the awning, and the innkeeper's boy dragged the box out and set it on his knees because he was bored.

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He pulled the bellows wide and the sound that came out was ugly and sad, a cow in a flooded field. The women laughed. He tried again and got a tune of sorts, a hymn with the wrong beat. Marta, who sold eggs and had never once been asked to sing, took the instrument from him without a word. She pressed the red keys she could reach and breathed slowly into the wood the way her grandmother had breathed into bread dough, and the notes came out round and warm, and the lamps seemed to lean toward them.

The rain stopped by the time she finished. The carter came back for his box and found it empty of cards and full of pink petals pressed flat between the bellows folds, the way the market women kept their best ribbons. He paid the innkeeper for the night. Nobody in Ashgrove ever learned who had given the flowers, though the boy swore the bellows had opened by themselves, and every wet spring after that, someone left a bud tucked into the frame of the Blue Lamb's door.