Black fine line tattoo of five guitar chord diagrams in a row across a forearm, with a hand gripping a guitar neck beside it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Five guitar chord diagrams on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Five guitar chord diagrams are tattooed in a row along the forearm, each drawn as a fretboard grid with finger position dots and a small fret number. The linework is thin, dark and uniform, with no shading or fill, and the diagrams step down in size from left to right. The image is in black and grey, and the background is plain and neutral with a hand and guitar neck visible at the right edge.

Fine line Forearm Music

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

Nobody in the repair shop on Crown Street had heard Ruth Callow play a chord, which is why the notebook mattered. It lived under the till, a damp green thing with a perished elastic band, and every page held the same five shapes in fountain pen: little necks of fretboard with dots where the fingers went and a fret number tucked in the corner. Her brother Dennis had drawn them the summer before he shipped out on the coasters. Underneath, in capitals, he had written KEEP THEM SMALL, PAPER IS DEAR.

Keep reading

She practised on a nylon-strung guitar that a customer had left for restringing and never collected. The first shape, open and wide, came easily enough. The third, a cramped little thing like a clenched fist, took her a fortnight of evenings and two cracked fingertips before it rang clean. Each time she copied the set into her own book she drew them a fraction smaller, because the margins were filling and she did not want to waste a line. By October the diagrams were the size of postage stamps, and the shop cat had learned to sleep on the notebook.

A postcard came in November, franked in Rotterdam, with no message but a sixth diagram drawn in pencil so faint she had to tilt it to the window. It was a shape she had never seen, and beside it Dennis had written, still in capitals, ALL FIVE ARE THE SAME HAND MOVED ALONG. She sat with it a long time, then took the guitar down from the wall and played the five in order, slowly, the way he must have learned them on some dark deck.

The last chord was the smallest, and it was the one that finally rang out, bright and thin, down Crown Street in the rain. Ruth did not look up when the bell over the door went. She knew whose boots those were, so she kept her fingers where they were and played the whole set through again.