Forearm tattoo of a cubist-style figure playing a piano, in black, grey and orange with bold outlines, on a person wearing a black top and jeans.

Cubist pianist on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A geometric, cubist-style figure with a distorted face and angular body sits at a piano, with hands resting on the keys. The work uses bold black outlines, smooth grey shading and flat blocks of pale skin tone, with a fine crosshatch pattern on parts of the torso. Orange and yellow fills frame the figure against the dark background of the sleeve, which wraps the full forearm.

Neo-trad Forearm Key Hand Figure

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tomasz,

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They made us unload the piano at the checkpoint at Vrbina, all four of us sweating under its weight while the officer walked round it twice with his torch. He wanted to know why a grown woman was carrying a box of wooden teeth across a border. I told him it was not a box, it was a piano, and that Father had played it every Sunday for thirty years. He lifted the lid himself and pressed one key. It came out flat and sour, and he looked almost offended, as if the instrument had insulted him personally.

Then he saw the photograph taped inside the lid, the one of Father at the keys with his face broken into pieces, each piece turned a different way, because that is how he always played, as though the music was reaching him from several rooms at once. The officer laughed, not unkindly, and said his own grandmother had hung a painting like that above her stove. He stamped our papers and waved the lorry through, and nobody asked about the hands.

I have a room ready in the house on Lipová Street, with the window facing the market. The tuner in town says he can bring the strings back to pitch in a week, but I have told him to wait. Mama hears the difference when we sing the Sunday hymn, and she says the flat notes sound like someone humming in the next room. I think we will keep it that way for a while.

Your sister, Eva