Black and grey tattoo of an electric guitar with swirling scrollwork and leaves on the forearm.

Electric guitar with scrollwork on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A detailed electric guitar, shown at an angle with its neck rising to the upper right, fills the centre of the forearm. Soft grey shading builds the body, pickups and knobs, while bold black scrollwork and small leaf shapes curl around the guitar. The photograph is taken against a bright red background that makes the grey tones of the skin and ink stand out.

Realism Forearm Guitar Scrollwork Swirl Leaves

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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

Sit down, sit down, you'll not hear me properly with you hovering by the door like that. The Halloway boy came up from the Dunmore pit with a guitar nobody had paid for, a Gibson the colour of strong tea, and he carried it through Hollin Bridge the way a man carries a sleeping child. Nobody in that town had ever seen a thing with curls cut into its body like that. The shop man on Fenner Street swore it was a violin with ideas above its station.

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Danny Halloway couldn't play a note for the first month. He sat on the back step of his mother's house with the thing across his knees and the wind taking the ash off his cigarette, and every evening the same three chords came out sour. Old Mrs Pryce next door banged on the wall with a broom handle. He took to playing in the coal shed instead, and the neighbours said it sounded like a kettle that had got religion.

Then one wet Thursday the pickups caught a hum off the tram wires on Mill Road, a fizz and a crackle, and suddenly every note he struck came back twice as loud and rolled over the rooftops. He wept, they say, and the carved vines up the body seemed to lift off the lacquer like smoke off a chimney. He swore each leaf had grown from a song he'd finished.

Mrs Pryce still hasn't forgiven him for the wall. But when the Corn Exchange flooded in '58 and the whole town stood in the dark, she was the first to ask him to play, and the leaves, so they say, rustled even when there wasn't a breath of wind. Mind that step on your way out, it's been loose since the flood.