Black outline tattoo of headphones with a trailing cable and the script lettering Music is the medicine of the mind, on the side of the ribs.

Headphones and quote on the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a line drawing of over-ear headphones with a coiled cable that loops down and across the skin, with the words Music is the medicine of the mind in flowing script beneath. The work is in black ink with clean outlines and no shading, and the lettering is set in a curved, handwritten style. The photograph is taken at an angle on the side of the torso, with a dark garment at the top edge and the design filling most of the frame.

Lettering Ribs Music Quote Cable

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The radio in the cab had been dead since Carlisle, so Marta counted the lorries ahead of her by their brake lights instead. Fourteen. The customs hall at Dover smelled of wet cardboard and instant coffee, and the officer with the grey crew cut had already asked her twice what was in the trailer. Lemons, she had said, and it was true for the first pallet. The second pallet held her brother's records, forty years of them in sleeves gone soft at the corners, bound for a flat in Lille where a man had promised to press a limited run.

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The officer lifted the tarpaulin and pulled out a box at random. Vinyl slid against vinyl with a sound like a slow breath. He held one up to the strip light, read the sleeve, and something in his face loosened. His own father had played this one, he said, on Sunday afternoons when the house was quiet. He handed the record back and waved the lorry through without another question.

Marta didn't start the engine straight away. On the passenger seat lay the headphones her brother had left behind when he went into hospital for the last time, the cable coiled in a neat loop the way he always wound it. She had never once managed to wind it like that. She put them on over her ears, pressed play on his old cassette deck, and let the road carry her south into the grey light, humming the chorus she had never learned all the way through.