Black and grey realism tattoo of a Gibson guitar headstock with tuning pegs and strings, running down the inside of a forearm.

Gibson guitar headstock on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A realistic guitar headstock is tattooed down the forearm, with the Gibson logo, six tuning pegs and a visible truss rod cover. The shading is black and grey, with soft gradients on the wood grain and strong contrast on the strings and dark inlays. The design fills the forearm vertically, with a shadowed edge fading into the skin at the wrist, and a fist and denim are visible below and beside it.

Realism Forearm Guitar String Music

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You take the stairs because the lift at Calder House has been dead since March, the case knocking against your shin on every landing. Eleven floors of concrete that smells of bleach and somebody's fried onions. Mr Dunmore left the guitar at your door with a note taped to the lid in capitals: TUNE HER BY EAR, DON'T TRUST THE PEGS. He never said where he learned to play, only that he'd learned on the balcony of flat 9 with the wind taking half the chords away.

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Inside, you open the case and the neck is there, pale ash grain under a skin of dust, six pegs in a row like old men waiting for the same bus. The strings have gone dull and the top one sings flat when you pluck it. You sit on the carpet with your back against the radiator and turn the peg a quarter inch at a time, listening to the estate below: a car alarm, a dog, a kid calling a name over and over until the name becomes a song of its own.

By the time the sixth string settles, the window has gone orange with the streetlamps and you have forgotten the stairs and the note and the eleven floors. You play the open chord Dunmore must have played a thousand times, badly at first, and then less badly, and the flat fills with a low hum that rattles the glass in its frame.

Downstairs a door bangs and someone shouts up the stairwell to turn that racket down. You laugh, then play the chord again, louder, so he can hear what the old man kept for himself.