Black and grey pencil drawing of a cassette tape labelled All Time Low with a skull and crossbones, its cable forming the words listen stereo in script.

Cassette tape with listen stereo script

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a cassette tape viewed at an angle, with a skull and crossbones and the words All Time Low on the label. A cable runs from the bottom of the cassette and loops into the cursive script words listen stereo. The shading is soft and graphic on a plain white background, with the cassette centred and the lettering across the lower part of the composition.

Cable Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Put the kettle on again, our Dilys, and mind the lead on the floor, it's been like that since your grandad rigged the wireless. Right, you want the one about the tape. Sit down, then.

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When the colliery shut in the spring of '84, Mr Ashworth from the pit office brought round a box of cassettes the lads had been swapping on the shift bus for years. Most were rubbish, copied off the radio with the presenters talking over the middle eight. But my Emrys kept one back. Grey plastic, a skull drawn on the sticker in biro, and a cable taped down the side because the deck ate its own tail every third song. He said, Mam, play it on the stereo, not the kitchen box. So we did. Thin and tinny, the singers stood at either end of the room like they were in chapel.

Every Friday after that, his boots on the step, I'd put the tape in and he'd sit with his back to the range and tell me what he'd heard. A lad from Treorchy. A bloke called Doug who sang like a gate hinge. The cable ran out of the back of the set, through the window and across the yard to the washing line, because that was the only way to pick up the choir from the next valley. Half of Pit Row did the same. You could walk down the street at night and hear forty kitchens playing forty different songs through the drainpipes.

Then one Friday he didn't come. The tape stayed in the deck for a year. When I finally pressed play, the first thing on it was Emrys laughing at something off the microphone, then saying, go on then, Mam, press it. So I did, and I'm still pressing it, love, every Friday, with the cable running out to the line.