Blue ink and pencil drawing of a gramophone with swirling scrolls, roses and floating music notes, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement visible.

Gramophone with flowers and music notes

Colour · Flash

A gramophone sits on a wooden base, with its horn opening into a large flower-like bloom. Ornate swirls, rose sprigs, leaves and musical notes spread out from the horn across the page. The linework is clean and the horn and record have soft pencil shading, all drawn in a single blue tone on cream paper.

Flower Rose Music note Swirl Scroll Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Okonedo on the eleventh floor had a gramophone older than my mum, and every Sunday at four it came through the wall of our flat like weather. I never knew what she played. Something with horns and a woman singing about rain, the needle dropping and lifting in the crackle before the tune caught. My brother Danny said she was dead and the machine was haunted. He was nine. I was twelve and had decided I was too old for ghosts.

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The summer the lift broke for six weeks, I started carrying her shopping up the stairs for the pound she offered, and she let me sit in her front room while she cleaned the record with a soft cloth as if it might bruise. The horn was painted cream with a bloom of gold at its mouth. She said her husband had bought it from a man in Brixton who sold everything with the price already crossed out.

On the last Sunday before school went back, she lifted the lid and showed me the inside: a little brass arm, a winding handle worn pale. "It doesn't play music," she said. "It lets the room breathe it out." I laughed. Then the record turned, the first notes rose from that flower-shaped horn, and the painted roses on the lacquer seemed to lift their heads toward the window, as though someone had opened it onto the rain.