Black line drawing of an electric guitar wrapped in a ribbon banner with roses and leaves, shown as a neo-traditional tattoo design with no body placement visible.

Electric guitar, ribbon and roses design

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A black outline drawing of an electric guitar with its neck running upwards, wrapped by a looping ribbon banner. Two roses in bud and open form, along with shaded leaves, fill the space around the guitar body, and a curled scroll sits at the top and a flourish at the bottom. The linework is bold and even, with hatched shading on the leaves and no colour or fill on the design.

Neo-trad Guitar Ribbon Rose Leaves Banner Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find the guitar in the back of Ferris's hut on the north shore, under a tarpaulin that smells of diesel and wet rope. It's a Les Paul with a cracked pickguard, and someone has wound a red satin ribbon round the neck the way people tie ribbons on gifts. Years of salt air have turned it the colour of weak tea. Ferris says the last man who played it caught the Tuesday ferry and never sent for it.

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You carry it down to the harbour wall that evening, where the boats knock together and the fishermen's wives sit knitting. You tune it by ear, the way your mother taught you before she moved to Penzance and stopped writing. The first chord comes out flat, and somebody on the wall laughs, though not unkindly. You keep at it until the strings settle, and the roses climbing the wall behind you seem to lean in to listen.

Ferris comes down with a bottle and tells you the ribbon was tied by a girl called Ines, who sang at the Anchor every Friday until the winter the cannery closed. He doesn't say where she went, and you don't ask. You play the one song you know all the words to, and by the second verse the whole wall is humming along.

At dawn you wind the ribbon back round the neck, tighter this time, and leave the guitar on Ferris's counter with a note that says only: tune it before you play. Out on the water the ferry sounds its horn twice, and you find you are already listening for the answer.