Guitar emerging from torn forearm skin

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A forearm shows a guitar neck, tuning pegs and strings with a script logo, rendered as if breaking through split skin. The shading is soft and greyscale, with dark recesses behind the strings and fine highlights on the metal parts. The tattoo fills the length of the forearm against a plain wooden surface.

Realism Forearm Guitar String Torn skin Script Logo

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Okonedo had mended instruments in the back room of the Attercliffe pawnshop for thirty-one years, and she had never once seen a guitar try to leave its case. The neck lay across the bench at four in the morning, the pegs turned a quarter inch on their own, as if someone under the lid were tightening them for a gig. Nobody had pawned it. The ticket taped to the case said Ray Dunmore, deceased, with a date in March.

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She knew the crack because she had seen it before, years back, when the strings went green and the wood split along the bridge. Now the timber had grown a membrane over itself, pale and soft as the inside of a wrist, and through it the strings showed in dark slots like the gaps between ribs. When she pressed a thumb to the fretboard the whole instrument hummed low, the way a fridge hums in an empty kitchen.

She rang the number on the ticket. A woman answered on the fifth ring and said Ray had left the guitar because it was the only thing in the flat that still sounded like him. The woman asked her, quite politely, to tell it to stop, because he was not coming back for it and it was keeping the neighbours awake.

Mrs Okonedo carried the case out to the yard, unlatched it in the grey light, and played one open chord. The skin split along the neck with a sound like a door closing somewhere far off. Then the instrument lay still, the pegs stopped turning, and she wrapped it in a dustsheet and wrote on the ticket: Released.