Traditional style colour tattoo of a gramophone playing a record with a red rose on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Gramophone and rose on an upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A colour tattoo of a vintage gramophone with a large fanned horn, sitting on a black record with a yellow label. A red rose with green leaves sits to the left, and the base of the gramophone is shaded in red and blue. Bold black outlines and flat, solid fills give it a classic traditional look against the skin.

Traditional Upper arm Rose Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourselves down, and mind the sawdust, because there's not much of it left. Mahoney's Travelling Show went under the winter the lions were sold to a zoo in Kent, and the big top went to a scrapyard in Goole in three sorry pieces. All that remained was the gramophone, a horn as wide as a cartwheel, bolted to a crate in the back of Ida Mahoney's Bedford van.

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Ida would not let anybody touch it. Every night in the dwindling towns, after the last clown had gone home with his greasepaint in his coat pocket, she'd wind that machine and drop the needle on the same record, a black thing with a yellow label that had come off a steamer from Lisbon in 1931. The label said Saudade in pen, and nobody ever asked her what it meant, though the old strongman swore it meant a dance you did alone.

The last night was in a field outside Doncaster, the rain coming sideways. Eleven people came. A boy with a bicycle, two nurses off shift, a man selling ice creams he had no hope of selling. Ida set the horn turning and the scratched music rose up out of it, and the rose she wore pinned at her collar, red as a stop light, seemed to lean toward the sound.

She danced with the boy. Nobody asked her to; she simply held out her hand. Then she lifted the record off, wrapped it in her Sunday scarf, and pressed it into his arms. "Keep it going," she said, "somewhere it can be heard." He still has it, I'm told, playing it to nobody in particular, and the tent poles are still standing in a barn in Goole, waiting for weather.