Traditional colour tattoo of a gramophone with red flowers and green leaves on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Gramophone and red flowers on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A gramophone with a wide orange horn, teal accents and a record on its turntable sits on a wooden case, flanked by two red flowers with green leaves. Bold black outlines define the shapes, with solid fills and soft gradient shading across the horn. The tattoo sits on a forearm against a dark background.

Traditional Forearm Flower Leaves Music

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the cat, it has already claimed the good cushion. Right. You want the one about the machine that sang with its mouth open. My grandmother's grandmother told it to me, and she had it from a man who swore he was on the Lyle Reach barge the night the horn came up out of the silt.

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Out past the salt flats, where the old towns drowned, there sat a wooden box with a brass crank and a trumpet of orange petals as wide as a cartwheel. Nobody in Haddon Cross knew what it was for. They used it as a planter, and red poppies grew from the cracks in its lid as if they had been waiting for it. Then Marlow Ibsen, who kept the pumps, lifted the lid and found a black disc lying on the turntable, grooved like a ploughed field, its red label gone pink from years of sun.

He wound the crank. Nothing. He wound it again, and the whole trumpet shivered, and a woman's voice rose out of the flowers, thin as a thread, singing about a girl who left a town by the water and never walked back up the shingle to it. The town listened for three nights running. On the fourth, the men worked out that the song was a map, and the girl had been walking towards the sea the whole time.

They carried the box down to the shore and set the horn facing the waves. The poppies still grow on its lid. When the wind is right, you can hear a voice coming back across the flats, singing the last verse that nobody in Haddon Cross ever managed to finish.