Black and grey tattoo of an acoustic guitar and a shaded white rose with leaves and scrolls across the upper arm and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Guitar and rose on upper arm and shoulder

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo of an acoustic guitar set diagonally across the arm, with a large shaded rose at the top and leaves and swirling scrolls filling the background. The linework is clean and the rose and guitar body use soft grey shading to create depth and highlights. The design wraps from the shoulder down the upper arm, and the photo is taken close up against a plain skin backdrop.

Realism Upper arm Shoulder Guitar Rose Leaves Scroll Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain came sideways through Saltergate Market that Thursday, and nobody lingered at the stalls unless they were under a tarp. I had propped the guitar against a stack of hessian sacks at stall eleven, its neck wrapped in a chequered scarf so the damp wouldn't get into the fretboard. By eleven o'clock I had sold everything else: the brass scales, the Pyrex dishes, two boxes of Reader's Digest. The guitar was the last thing on the trestle.

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"It was my husband's," I told the man in the waxed jacket, who had been turning it over for ten minutes without asking the price. "Dennis bought it off a lad outside the Co-op in 1971 for four pounds and a packet of Woodbines. He could only play three chords, but he played them like he meant every one."

The man ran his thumb along the edge of the soundhole, where Dennis had pencilled leaves and curling ferns during the long nights of the strike, then shaded them with a stub of charcoal from the fire. Halfway up the body sat a rose, its petals grey where the light didn't reach. I had never let anyone touch it. I watched his thumb move over the petals and found I didn't mind.

He strummed a G, then an open C that rang out over the drip of the awning, and the tarp shivered with it. "Sounds sad," he said. "Good sad."

"It isn't sad," I said. "It just doesn't know how to stop." I took his twenty pounds, folded it into my coat pocket, and left the scarf on the neck when he carried the guitar off through the rain, because I had never wanted it back.