Traditional style tattoo of a grey gramophone releasing hearts, with a small house below and one red heart, on the front of a thigh.

Gramophone releasing hearts on a thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a gramophone whose flared horn releases a stream of heart shapes, with a small cottage-style house drawn beneath it. The linework is bold and outlined, with grey shading giving the horn and house volume. Most of the design is grey ink, with a single red heart at the top right of the trail of hearts, and the tattoo is photographed against a blue skirt and wooden floor.

Traditional Thigh Heart House

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

The gramophone had belonged to Mrs Oddie at number nine, and when she died her nephew sold it to Harold Penrose for two pounds and a jar of blackberry jam. Harold carried it up the hill to the cottage on Larch Lane in a wheelbarrow, swearing at every pothole, and set it on the windowsill where the afternoon sun could find the brass. He had never owned a record in his life. He bought one that Saturday, a dance band thing with a scratch across the first bar, and played it until the needle skipped.

Keep reading

Joan came up the lane on the Tuesday with a tin of scones and the look she gave everything she disapproved of. She stood in the doorway and listened to the wheezing horn, the tinny trumpets, the hiss between the bars, and said that it sounded like a kettle having a nightmare. Harold said he had been meaning to get a new needle. Joan said he had been meaning to do a great many things. Then she sat on the arm of his chair without being asked, which was the first time either of them admitted anything.

They did not marry that year, or the next. Harold fixed the roof and Joan fixed the curtains, and the gramophone turned slowly on its turntable while they argued about hymns and rationing and whether a man could be trusted with a hedge. Each time the record ended Harold lifted the arm and Joan wound the crank, and somewhere in the middle of the second winter she started humming along to the trumpets, badly, on purpose.

When the removal van came for the cottage fifty years later, the men found a single tin box under the stairs, full of small paper hearts cut from old wrapping paper. Each had a date on the back, and the last one, in Joan's careful hand, read only: still playing.