Black and grey realistic tattoo of a guitar neck and body appearing to tear through skin on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Guitar neck tearing through a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows the neck and body of a guitar, with strings, tuning pegs and a small reversed word on the body, shown as though the skin is peeled back to reveal it. The shading is smooth and dark with strong contrast, giving the metal and wood a three-dimensional look. The black and grey photograph is a close crop of the forearm and wrist against a plain, textured surface.

Realism Forearm Guitar String Torn skin Skin

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Three weeks out from Valparaíso, the swell has the hold creaking like an old wardrobe, and you have not touched the guitar since Tuesday. It hangs in the bosun's locker on a nail, neck up, the way Dolan taught you to hang anything that matters. Its strings have gone green where the sweat collects. You know that if you pluck the low E it will sound like a foghorn with a cold.

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The trouble started in the Pacific, when the cook's boy went over the side in a squall and the radio operator swore he heard a chord played from the water. Nobody believed him, but nobody slept well after. You sat up on the foredeck with the instrument across your knees and played the one song your mother knew, badly, until the sky greyed. Somewhere in that night the neck began to push up through the skin of your forearm, pegs first, then the scroll, then the stripes of the strings, each one thin and trembling like a stay in a gale.

Dolan says it isn't a curse, only a sailor's bad habit made visible. He says the sea takes whatever you keep close, and you have kept the music close for thirty years, through two divorces and a boat that never once came home dry. On the forty-first day, when the chart shows nothing but blue and a single pencilled cross, you lift the guitar out of the locker and tune it by ear, peg by peg, the wood warm against your wrist. The lowest string hums. Beneath the deck, the hull answers.