Colour neo-traditional tattoo on the outer thigh showing an orange gramophone, a red rose with green leaves and the lettering THE THERAPISTS PUMPING THROUGH YOUR SPEAKERS.

Gramophone, rose and lettering on a thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows an orange gramophone with a large horn and a dark record player base, beside a red and purple rose with green leaves. Above them, the words THE THERAPISTS PUMPING THROUGH YOUR SPEAKERS are written in black capitals with thin red lines crossing some words. Bold black outlines and flat, saturated colour fill the motifs, with a pale blue wash behind the rose and gramophone.

Neo-trad Lettering Thigh Rose Lettering Horn Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tuesday, and the wind off the marsh still smells of onions from the burger van. Ada has been up the ladder since six, painting the horn of the gramophone a shade Mr Crane calls cathedral orange, which means too bright for anybody on the lane to miss. The record player base is dark as a coal shed. She has put a rose on the lid in plum and wine, leaves blotted in while the paint was still wet, so it looks like it has sat there for a century.

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The board is the trouble. Mr Crane wanted THE THERAPISTS PUMPING THROUGH YOUR SPEAKERS in capitals, a line Ada picked up from the lad who runs the waltzer, meaning the men who keep the rides, the records and the patter going until the gates shut. Then Crane read it from the entrance and said it sounded like a complaint. So Ada drew her thin red line through THERAPISTS, then PUMPING, THROUGH and SPEAKERS, one stroke at a time, and wrote nothing new beneath. "Let them squint," she said. "They always come for the bit they can't read."

Thursday. The gramophone played Glenn Miller until the battery died at ten, and the crowd stood under the lights listening to a tune with a hiss in it. A girl from the candyfloss stall asked whether the rose was real. Ada said it was the only thing on the lot that never needed winding up. I think she meant it kindly. She also said the hiss was the record remembering it had been played.

Saturday, and the fair packs up. Ada wraps the horn in a blanket and lays the lid in the van last, rose uppermost, so the paint has a chance to set before the frost.