Black and grey realistic sleeve design showing headphones with wings, roses, a vintage microphone, a script banner and sheet music, shown as a flat design rather than on skin.

Music sleeve design with headphones and roses

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

The design features a pair of headphones with feathered wings, two roses on the upper section, a large rose at lower left, and a vintage microphone. A script banner and staves of musical notes with lyrics run across the lower half, and musical notes float in the background. The shading is smooth and greyscale, with soft gradients on the roses and metal parts and bold contrast on the microphone grille.

Realism Wing Rose Microphone Music note Sheet music Banner Script Sleeve

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 cable to the microphone has a kink in it that no amount of gaffer tape will straighten, so you tape it anyway, kneeling on the parquet of the Garrow Memorial Hall while the caterers clatter trays on the far side of the partition. Forty minutes until the first guests come through the door, and the man who was meant to sing has lost his voice to a cold he caught in Margate.

Keep reading

The groom asked for one song only, the one his nan used to play on the kitchen radio, and a set of lyrics that someone had photocopied so many times the staves had gone grey and furry. Nobody else in the village knows it. So you lift the old headphones off the desk, the pair with the feathered wing stamped on the band, and you put them on to check the levels. Your own voice comes back at you thin and hopeful through the foam. You have never sung in front of anyone. You say so out loud, to nobody in particular.

The bride finds you at the lectern, mouthing the second verse. She doesn't laugh. She takes the pencil from behind her ear and draws a small arrow above the word cause, the way her nan used to mark up a hymn book, and tells you to breathe after real because that is where the song takes its breath. The room fills in ones and twos. When you reach the line about making it real for me, the hall goes quiet enough to hear the urn ticking, and you look up to find her in the front row, mouthing it back. Afterwards she keeps the pencil.