Black and grey lettering tattoo on a forearm showing a treble clef, music notes and media player symbols beside the words The moments, The memories, The pain, The happiness.

Music notes and media controls on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A treble clef, four music notes and four media player symbols (play, pause, stop and repeat) sit alongside four lines of cursive script reading The moments. The memories. The pain. The happiness. The linework is smooth and solid, with the clef and symbols in bold black ink and the script in finer strokes. The tattoo is shown in a black and grey photograph on the inner forearm, with the arm resting on a dark leather surface.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The reel arrived in a biscuit tin wrapped in a tea towel that still smelled of Jeyes Fluid. Someone had written on the lid in fountain pen, four short lines and nothing else. I had been hired to lift the hiss off old tapes for the county archive, so I set my machine on a trestle table in the chapel of Hollin Keep, where the roof had gone years ago and the rain came in sideways through the lancet windows.

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The deck had four buttons worn grey at the centre: play, pause, stop and repeat. I pressed play at half four and a dance band swelled out of the speaker, a saxophone a touch sharp, a bass drum a half beat behind. Before the first tune a man cleared his throat and counted the set the way bandleaders do, slow and private, naming his parts. The moments. The memories. Then a long hush, the pain, and then the happiness, and the band came in on the beat as if nothing had happened.

I listened for three days with my boots on the flagstones and a flask going cold beside me. The repeat button had been jammed down with a matchstick, so every song ran again and again until I lifted it, and each time the man counted the set in the same order, the same slow voice, the same pause before the word pain. A woman laughed somewhere in the background and called him Dougie, and said he never once let anyone else pick the tunes. The owners had sold the stonework for a farm years back, and nobody I asked in the village had heard of a dance in the keep.

On the fourth evening I reached for the stop button, as I had every evening, and stopped myself. The tape was nearly spent. I let the band play out the last waltz to the end of the spool and sat in the cold while the hiss rolled on, which I now think is only the room keeping time.

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