Black and grey realism tattoo of a vintage microphone surrounded by music notes, a treble clef and outline stars on a calf.

Microphone and music notes on a calf

Realism · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A vintage microphone is shaded in black and grey at the centre of the design, with its grille and stand rendered in detail. Music notes, a treble clef, a bass clef and a sharp sign are drawn in solid shading, while outline stars sit around them on the skin. The tattoo is photographed against a dark textured background, with the foot visible at the bottom of the frame.

Realism Calf Microphone Music note Star Treble clef Bass clef

Find an artist for this

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

The microphone had come up from the village hall in a fertiliser sack, its grille bent where the minibus had braked on the Ledbury road, and Nell spent the first hour of the harvest dance coaxing it back into shape with pliers borrowed from the press shed. The extension lead ran across the grass like a grey vine to the generator, which coughed every time someone tapped a cider barrel. Ladders leaned against the Bramleys. Paper lanterns swung between the trunks, and the light caught the wasps drifting over the windfalls.

Keep reading

Her father's songs were still in a cardboard box under the trestle table, written out in pencil, the staves ruled with a dinner fork. He had called the sharp sign the most honest mark in the world, because it asked you to lift a note and say so out loud. Nell had never believed him until a gust lifted the top page and carried it off between the trees, notes skidding through the grass until they stopped at the boots of Joan Pike, who picked the sheet up and held it out like a summons.

'Sing it sharp,' Joan said. 'That's how he'd have wanted it.'

So Nell stood by the press with the old microphone humming against her collarbone, and when the fiddler found the key she lifted the first line a half step higher than the paper told her. The crowd cheered, the generator steadied, and somewhere beyond the orchard a dog barked in time with the bass drum the boys had made from a feed bin. Apples dropped one after another into the long grass, keeping time, and she sang until the sky over the hop yards went the colour of a bruise and then of nothing at all.