Coloured pencil drawing of a neo-traditional tattoo design showing a vintage microphone wrapped in a banner with roses and leaves, not shown on skin.

Microphone and roses tattoo design

Neo-trad · Mixed · Flash

A vintage microphone with a jewelled detail sits at the centre, wrapped by a ribbon banner with script lettering, and framed by shaded roses with dark outlines and green leaves. The linework is bold and dark, with grey shading on the roses and banner and coloured pencil accents in the microphone, leaves and petals. The design is drawn on white paper, centred and filling most of the frame, with art pens and pencils visible at the top and right edges.

Neo-trad Microphone Rose Banner Leaves Script Music

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mic had been dead since the Tuesday residency ended, but Marnie still kept it on the stool by the sound desk, its chrome grille catching the work lights like a row of teeth. Nobody at the Crown Street Social had the nerve to move it. Old Dennis, who ran the bar and had run it since the seventies, said it was bad luck to wheel a singer's mic off the stage before the last song was sung, and the last song had never been sung.

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So on Thursday, when the new girl from the Tuesday agency asked why the roses were pressed flat under the glass of the bar top, Marnie told her the truth, which was that Gerald had bought them from the florist on the corner the week before he left, and that they had been wilting ever since, and that nobody had the heart to throw them out. The roses were grey in the photograph taped behind the till. They had been red in person, Marnie said, and smelt of cough sweets.

The new girl wanted to know what the ribbon said. Marnie pulled the banner tight across her palm and read the lettering the way Gerald used to read set lists, tilting her head at the loops. Music, she said. Then the hashtag, which he had insisted on after a boy in the crowd filmed him. Then the word that had been his only lyric all year, which was simply stay.

She switched off the work lights. Under the bar, the dead microphone still held its little pink jewel, and Marnie left it there, turned towards the empty room, as though it might yet be asked for one more verse.