Colourful neo-trad style tattoo of a cassette tape with a yellow label and a trailing black ribbon, on a calf, set against coloured dots and a green and yellow wash.

Cassette tape on a calf

Neo-trad · Calf · Colour · Photo

A cassette tape sits diagonally across the calf, with a yellow label bearing the script words "I feel you" and a black ribbon of tape trailing from the bottom edge into a loop. The cassette is rendered with shaded metal reels, grey and blue casing and fine highlights, and it is surrounded by flat, bold dots in orange, pink, navy and yellow over a soft green and yellow wash. The palette is bright and saturated, and the composition fills the leg with the cassette as the main focal point.

Neo-trad Realism Calf Ribbon Dot Script Music

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tape jammed on side B, the way the old Philips always did, so Nessa knelt on the kitchen lino with a biro and coaxed the ribbon back onto the spool. Outside, the bins were going over in the wind and her mum was shouting about the kettle. She had been up since six making this thing, eleven songs taken off the radio the week before, each one cut in with the pause button so the DJ never got a word in.

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Callum was leaving on the Monday for a deckhand job out of Aberdeen, which meant four weeks on, two weeks off, and a bus to Stonehaven that took the whole morning. He had never been one for letters. He did not own a record player, only a Walkman that ate batteries and a jacket with the lining hanging out. She had drawn dots all over the inlay card in felt tip, orange and pink and a yellow that bled through the paper, and across the label she had written I feel you in the joined-up hand her nan had taught her, then gone over the words twice because the first pass looked like an apology.

On the Sunday night he rang from the phone box at the end of Cuthill Road, the coins clattering in and out. He said he'd played the tape in the van and it had got to the fourth song before he noticed she had talked over the chorus, and then he had laughed so hard the driver pulled over. She told him that was the point. He said he knew. There was a long gap on the line where neither of them spoke, the pips went, and she fed in another coin she could not afford.

When she went round the next morning, the cassette was lying on the doorstep, pulled out of its case, a single black loop of tape trailing across the step towards the gate. Tucked under it was a note scrawled on the back of a bus timetable: Rewind it. Then play it again. I'll be listening.