Realism sleeve tattoo on an upper arm showing a cello scroll with gears, a harmonica, and sheet music with a red ink splash.

Cello scroll and sheet music sleeve

Realism · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo covers the upper arm and shoulder with a large cello scroll fitted with metal gears, a harmonica, and a sheet of printed music notation behind them. The scroll and instruments are shaded in fine greyscale with highlights and soft shadows that give them a three-dimensional look. A red splash and a black ink blot sit on the lower right, adding the only strong colour to an otherwise grey composition.

Realism Upper arm Scroll Gear Sheet music Music note Ink splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cello came aboard at Southampton wrapped in oilcloth and labelled in a stranger's hand, and by the third night out it had found its way down to my workshop under the engine room stairs. Its scroll had split clean through, and someone long ago had tried to mend it with brass gears pinched from a chronometer, which is how I came to be sitting at two in the morning with a jeweller's loupe in one eye and the hull groaning under my boots.

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The owner was a dance-hall pianist named Ada Quarrie, bound for Buenos Aires on a contract she never explained. She left me a waltz to copy out, the paper foxed and splashed with a red ink that had soaked through three bars when the ship took a wave off Ushant. The notes ran like a bleeding finger. I traced them by lamplight while the harmonica she had pressed on me rattled in my breast pocket, and I found I was humming the tune under my breath to keep time with the pistons.

On the ninth night the sea went flat and the engine stopped for an hour. In that silence the cello gave one low note on its own, a sound I first took for the bulkhead settling. I held the scroll in both hands and turned the smallest gear with my thumb, and the note climbed, slow and true, all the way up into the dark over the water.

When we docked, Ada came down the gangway in her grey gloves and asked what she owed me. I told her I would take my wages in a tune. She opened the case and played the waltz through once, the ink still tacky on the last line where I had not yet mended the tear, and for the length of a bar nobody on that quay moved.