Colour tattoo of an acoustic guitar with a red and black body and black music notes floating beside it, across a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Acoustic guitar and music notes on upper back

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A large acoustic guitar fills the centre of the upper back, with its body shaded in deep red, brown and black and its neck and sound hole rendered in solid black linework. Single and paired music notes drift up and to the sides, drawn in thin black lines, with a faint swirl of green and red wash behind them. The photograph is taken straight on, showing the head cropped out at the top and a green top with straps at the edges of the frame.

Back Guitar Music note Music

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody tells you that a guitar wants to be played in the rain. Mine sat in the back of the van through three weeks of wet on the Medway bridges, and when I finally got her out in Chatham the strings had gone the colour of weak tea. I sat on an upturned crate outside the Co-op and tuned her by ear, which Dougie says is the only honest way, and a woman with a pushchair stopped to listen while I found the low E.

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She didn't drop a coin. She asked if I knew anything by the Waterboys, and when I said no, she hummed the first line of something I half recognised and I found the chords for it without thinking. We did four songs. By the fourth the notes were coming out of the case of my lungs as much as the strings, the way they do when the street has stopped being a street and become a room.

When she wheeled off, a folded paper lay on the crate under my boot, a sheet torn from a hymn book with a melody copied out in pencil, dotted quavers and all, and under it, in biro, Play it slower, love. I still have it. I tried it slower, and it was a different tune entirely, the sort you could hear from the other side of a river.