Traditional colour tattoo of a gramophone with green leaves on a calf, set against a grey dotwork background with the word HARDCORE.

Gramophone and leaves with HARDCORE lettering on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Colour · Photo

A gramophone with a flared horn sits on a red and black base, surrounded by green leaves and a sprig at the bottom. Behind it, the word HARDCORE is set in large letters on a grey stippled dotwork background. The bold outlines and solid red, yellow and green fills give the piece a classic traditional look, and the design is centred on the lower leg.

Traditional Dotwork Calf Leaves Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody brings a gramophone in on a Tuesday unless somebody has died, and this one came up the back stairs in a tea chest with the lid taped shut. Mr Pardoe set it on my bench as if it might bite him. The horn was the colour of old brick, the base as red as a pillar box, and the rubber mat on the turntable had gone to crumbs. 'Aunt Vi wouldn't let anyone touch it,' he said. 'Says it plays one record and one record only.'

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The record was in the cabinet under the platter, a shellac disc with a paper label so foxed it looked like weak tea. Someone had written across it in careful capitals, HARDCORE, and beneath that, in a different hand, the name of a dance hall in Grimsby and the year 1951. I cleaned the groove with a soft brush, fitted a new needle and wound the handle until my wrist ached. The first thing out of the horn was a cough, then a drum that sounded as if it was being played in the next room, then a man laughing too loudly.

Pardoe sat on the stool and said nothing for a long while. The tune was nothing special, a dance band with a brass section that couldn't keep time, but the workshop seemed to fill with the smoke of a room forty years gone. When the record ran out he told me Vi had been a cloakroom girl at that hall, that she had nicked the disc from a bandleader who owed her wages, and that the word on the label was the band's joke about how they played. It had taken him four decades to ask her what it meant.

When he left I found a sprig of leaves pressed flat between the cabinet door and its frame, green gone brown at the edges, the same shape as the hedge outside the hall. I laid them in the empty tea chest beside the record and wound the handle once more, just to hear the cough again.