Sketchy black and red tattoo of a man in a bowler hat with a cog over one eye, set against music staves on an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bowler hat portrait over music staves on upper arm

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A loose portrait of a man in a bowler hat, with a cog shape over one eye, drawn in painterly black and grey shading with red wash on the face. Faint music staves and notes run behind the head and down the arm. The tattoo covers the upper arm and shoulder, with the face placed near the centre of the composition.

Upper arm Portrait Man Cog Musical note Face

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fog came in again on the Tuesday, and Tobias Ure took his bowler down from its peg and said he would not go out without a tune. Nine boats were past the breakwater and the harbour master had only a handbell to call them home. Tobias kept a barrel organ in the back room of the chandlery, a brass cog the size of a saucer bolted to its side, and a drawer of paper rolls punched with holes like a sieve.

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His grandmother had told him the old rule of Skerrow. A tune carried over water when it was simple enough to hum back, and no fisherman ever drowned who could hum the tune home. So he chose the one the wives sang at the quay gate, four notes up and two down, and he wound the handle until the cog clicked and the pins lifted. The sound went out flat and bright across the grey. Somewhere beyond the wall a gull answered it, then a horn, then another horn.

The last boat was the Mercy Anne, with her boy at the tiller. The boy could not read a stave, but he had sung that tune at the gate every Sunday of his life, and when the fog thinned he let the bow swing toward the sound and kept it there. Tobias cranked until his wrist ached and the paper roll began to tear at the top. Then the Mercy Anne bumped the wall and the boy jumped onto the steps, grinning, with his hands wet.

Tobias hung the bowler back on its peg. The organ was quiet and the fog was still thick, but the wives were humming on the quay, and their voices carried further than any brass. He did not play again that night. The tune had got home without him.