Black and grey fine line tattoo of headphones with the cable running into the script word mmmbop, on the side of the ribs.

Headphones and script on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A pair of headphones is drawn with shaded black and grey linework, with a thin cable curving from the earpiece into a cursive script word. The headphones have soft grey shading and a faint reddish tint on the headband. The tattoo sits on the side of the torso against plain skin, with a white cloth at the top edge of the frame.

Fine line Lettering Ribs Cable Script Music Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cable was the only thing on the Carrow Pier ballroom that never went out of tune. Every Saturday I wound it round my elbow at the end of the night, forty feet of it, and every Saturday Mr Halloran said the same thing: wind it the other way, Ruth, you'll kink the copper. He was right and I never once did it his way. The headphones were his, heavy grey cans with a band he'd mended with black electrical tape, and he let me wear them only when the hall was empty and the sea came up under the boards.

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That September the bands stopped coming. The bookings went to a club in town with a laser floor, and our ballroom turned into a place where we played the same four records to eleven people and a man who wanted the toilets. Halloran sat on the edge of the stage with the cans round his neck and hummed one daft line over and over, no proper words, just mmm bop, mmm bop, while his thumb tapped the wood. I asked him what it was. He said it was the only song he'd ever got all the way to the end of.

I didn't understand until the winter, when he could no longer manage the stairs to the sound box. I took the headphones up to him at the home on the front and held the cable while he listened to a tape of the hall from 1961, all crackle and trombone. His eyes shut. The cable lay slack across the blanket, looping between us like a line someone had drawn and forgotten to finish. When I started to take the cans away he caught my wrist and said, Keep humming it, love, I can't find the tune from here. So I did, badly, and for once I left the cable where it fell.