Colour tattoo of a cassette tape with black outlines and pink, purple and teal watercolour-style shading, on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cassette tape tattoo on the ribs

Ribs · Colour · Photo

A cassette tape is drawn in bold black outline with a pale label area, a dark window with two white reels, and a small label tab at the top right. The fill uses soft pink, purple and teal washes that blend into the lighter areas, giving a loose, painterly look. The design sits diagonally across the side of the ribs, with a hand holding fabric at the top right of the frame.

Ribs Music

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Side A is the one your sister always skipped, so you start there, the cheap cassette deck balanced on the draining board where the gas meter ticks. Dai from the Co-op dubbed it for you the week before the cage went down, pressing record off the radio in his front room on Chapel Row. Under the hiss a fiddle is tuning up, and then the announcer clears his throat and the whole thing sounds like a dance hall in another county.

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The pit closed in March. Nobody bought the lamps or the lockers, and the men who used to sing on the bus now sit on the wall outside the institute with their hands folded, waiting on the post. You flip the tape with the blunt end of a pencil, the way Dai showed you, because the spool jams if you use your fingers. Your mother says it was never going to last. She says it while she irons the good shirt anyway, the one you wore to the wedding nobody had money for.

Side B opens with the song you were going to dance to at the Miners' Gala. He wrote a name on the label in capitals, and under it, smaller, a question mark. You still don't know what the question was, and by the time you work it out the tape has run to its end, the two white reels turning slower and slower until the last of the fiddle drops into the silence of the kitchen, and all you can hear is the clock.