Colourful forearm tattoo of an electric guitar body and neck with strings and pickups, set against red sun rays and black ink splatter.

Electric guitar and red sunburst on a forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows an electric guitar with its neck, strings, pickups and control knobs running down the forearm, with small handwritten-style words in the upper section. Behind the guitar, red sun rays radiate across the skin, and black ink splatter overlaps the design. The guitar is drawn in fine black outlines and solid black fills, while the red background is applied in broad, soft-edged washes.

Forearm Guitar String Sun rays Splatter Word

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The guitar came into the back room on a Tuesday, wrapped in a bin bag and smelling of rain and cigarettes. Dev Okafor had repaired amplifiers above the launderette on Cable Street for twenty-six years, and he peeled the plastic back carefully. The pickups were scorched, the strings had gone the colour of old pennies, and the body had been sprayed red in long, fierce arcs from the headstock to the bridge, with black ink flung across them as if someone had lost an argument with a paintbrush.

Keep reading

Inside the control cavity he found a folded setlist, and on its back, in biro, a run of words that had been torn apart and put back together: don't, stop, tell, the, angel. Someone had also written along the neck in a looping hand, as though to keep the frets from forgetting their order. Dev read the words aloud to the empty shop, the way his grandmother used to read a letter before deciding whether to post it. None of it made sense, and that seemed to be the point.

Three nights later a woman in a green parka stood at the counter and asked whether it was ready. She said her brother had played it in a band called the Lamplighters, and that he had painted the sunrise himself in a flat above a chip shop in 1989, the night before he walked out of a gig at the Ship and never came back for it. "He always said the words were for whoever fixed it," she said. "Not for the crowd. For the person who had to listen."

Dev plugged it into the amp on the bench and turned the volume down to almost nothing. One string rang out, thin and bright, then the second joined it, and the old ink on the scratchplate seemed to shiver. He let the note hang until the room was full of it, then wrote the woman's name at the top of the setlist, under the broken words, and handed her the guitar still humming.