Black solid tattoo of a guitar headstock inside an outlined guitar pick, placed on the back of an ankle.

Guitar headstock in a pick on ankle

Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a solid black guitar headstock with tuning pegs, set inside an outlined guitar pick shape. The lines are bold and even, and the design is filled in one flat black with no shading. It sits on the back of the ankle and is photographed head on against pale skin and a plain background.

Ankle Guitar Music

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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

You find the pick on the wet pavement outside the Adelphi on a Tuesday, after the last bus has gone and the shutters are down. It is the colour of weak tea and shaped like a tear, and someone has printed a guitar headstock on it in solid black, six tuning pegs fanned along the top like a crown nobody asked for. You turn it over. The back is blank. You put it in your coat pocket because the pocket is there and the night is cold.

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For a month you play nothing. Your own guitar hangs on the wall by the boiler with its strings gone slack since the summer, and you tell yourself the pick is only a souvenir of a gig you did not play. Still, at the bus stop you flick it between finger and thumb the way old Harry Coates used to with a sixpence at the Plough. The ink wears thin where your thumb rubs the neck of the headstock. One evening you take the guitar down, tune the low E by ear, and the room hums back at you as if it remembers.

Dee comes to the stop the following Tuesday in a yellow raincoat, reading the timetable as though it might change its mind. She asks whether you have seen a pick, a plastic one, black on cream. Her uncle gave it to her before he left for Glasgow and she has been half out of her mind since. You hold it out. She turns it over, frowns at the blank back, then looks at you.

'Keep it,' she says. 'He had a box of them. I'd rather he got used to being lost.' The bus lights up the corner and she is gone before you can answer. Walking home you stop under the streetlamp and find the pocket seam with your thumb, where the pick used to ride, and you hum the open E all the way to the door.