Black brush-stroke guitar with a heart sound hole and the script words For the love of music on the outer thigh.

Brush guitar with script quote on a thigh

Lettering · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A black brush-stroke guitar with a neck and body outline sits on the outer thigh, with a small heart cut into the sound hole. The words For the love of music in black cursive script run diagonally up the left side of the design. The work is solid black ink on pale, freckled skin with a plain background.

Lettering Thigh Guitar Heart Music Quote Script text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pull your stool closer, love, and mind the sawdust, because this is the last of the Halloran Brothers' Travelling Marvels and the tent poles remember every show we ever gave. Forty years ago the big top had four rings and a calliope that could wake the dead in Stockport. By the summer I'm telling you about, there was one ring, one clown who had forgotten his face, and a boy called Tobin Ash who mended the canvas with his mother's darning needle.

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Tobin had a guitar that was mostly glue. Its neck came from a broken oar and its belly from a cheese crate, and when he played it the strings buzzed like wasps trapped in a jar. Nobody paid him any mind until the rain came in sideways one Thursday in Hull and sent the audience running for the coaches. He sat alone under the drip bucket and played anyway, and the cats of the town came in out of the wet to listen.

The lion had gone to a zoo in Wales, the horses were sold to a glue works, and Old Halloran was tired of telling people the show would go on. So Tobin cut a small heart into the sound hole with his mother's penknife, because he said a song needed somewhere to leave the box. That night the tent came down around them, slow as a sigh, and the three of them carried the poles home on their shoulders.

Now the boy runs a music shop in Leeds, and the guitar hangs on the wall with its heart still open. Every spring he sends me a postcard, and every postcard says the same thing in the same curling hand: for the love of music. I keep them in the tin where the penknife used to live. Mind your step going out, the sawdust gets everywhere.