Realism style black and grey cassette tape tattoo with a trailing tape ribbon on the upper arm, shown in two side-by-side photographs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cassette tape with trailing tape on arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The image shows two side-by-side photographs of the same tattoo of a cassette tape, with a long strip of tape spilling out of its base and looping down the arm. The cassette has detailed shading, highlights on its edges and a dark label window, and the trailing tape is rendered in soft greys with a sense of depth. The dark background sets off the skin and the cassette sits at the top of the frame.

Realism Upper arm Music

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Marnie,

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The tape jammed on side two, so I've wound the loose ribbon back with a biro and it still wobbles through the middle of the Ruth Carver song like a boat at its mooring. Don't tell Dad I used the good blanks. He's been down the harbour wall since six, mending the net the Kestrel dragged in, and he says a tape is only as honest as its splice.

Mrs Penhallow at the chandlery swapped me the blanks for three crab pots' worth of your old sheet music, so the labels are her handwriting, not mine. Side one is everything you hummed on the slipway the summer before you went up to London. Side two is the stuff I wasn't brave enough to say aloud, which is mostly the sea and the bus timetable.

The ferry leaves on Tuesday. If the ribbon tangles in your bag, unspool it slowly and don't yank, the way Grandad taught us with the old reels. Play it in the train window when the Tamar goes grey. The last track is the fog horn I recorded from the wall at dawn, so you'll hear the town before you see it.

Love, Jess