Colour tattoo of a cartoon penguin wearing headphones, with a trail of music notes and a heart-shaped treble clef, on the side of the torso.

Penguin with headphones and music notes

Neo-trad · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A cartoon penguin wearing red and black headphones sits on a small blue patch, holding a dark object in one flipper. A dotted trail of black music notes curls up from the penguin toward a heart-shaped treble clef at the right. The penguin is shaded with soft colour in orange, pink, red and blue, while the notes and clef are solid black on pale skin.

Neo-trad Ribs Penguin Music note Treble clef Heart

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hall still smelled of floor polish and the orange squash nobody had finished at the last sports day. Gemma Ortiz found me by the trophy cabinet, holding a cassette in a plastic sleeve as if it might bite. 'You kept it, didn't you,' she said. I had. It had been in the glovebox of a car I hadn't driven since the MOT ran out.

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The label was in our handwriting, badly: PENGUIN CLUB, LUNCHTIME, DO NOT ERASE. We had met in the music block every Tuesday because it was the only room with a working radiator, and because Mr Halliwell let us use the stereo if we promised not to touch the piano. Our logo was a penguin Gemma had drawn in biro, wearing headphones and sitting on a blue blob that was meant to be the sea. Nobody ever explained why a penguin needed headphones. Penguins were the only birds who never flew off, Gemma said, so they had time to listen.

We found a boombox in the staffroom and plugged it in under the basketball hoop. The tape hissed, then Gemma's voice came out, shrieking the chorus of a song none of us could now name, and somebody's drum fill tumbled down the stairs. We laughed until the new caretaker came out to see what the noise was, and then we laughed harder, because he had no idea what he was looking at.

Halfway through, I noticed the notes I'd scribbled on the sleeve, a dotted trail curling up like smoke towards a heart-shaped clef, and realised we had never once got the key right. Gemma pressed rewind. Nobody suggested we stop.