Red, orange and black tattoo of a man's face with a cassette tape reel and gears on the forearm, in a loose painterly style with halftone dots.

Portrait with cassette and gears on forearm

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A stylised portrait of a man's face sits at the centre of the design, with a cassette tape reel at the upper left and a large cog at the lower edge. The black shapes are bold and graphic, while the red and orange areas are loose, splattered washes with spray-like streaks and a dotted halftone pattern across the upper right. The tattoo is shown in colour on the outer forearm against a dark background.

Forearm Portrait Face Man Gear Cog Splatter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Idris Vaughan bought the cassette recorder off a man in Treorchy for nine pounds and a promise to mend his brother's gutters, and he carried it up the terraces like something that might wake. Nobody in our row had owned one. By the time the winding wheel at Nantglas went still for the last time in April, the machine had been running in the miners' club for a fortnight, catching everything: the darts, the coughing, the clatter of tea urns, and Idris himself, humming through his teeth.

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The club had a piano nobody could tune and a stage nobody swept. Idris wanted the men to sing, not be sung about. He made us stand by the bar with our caps in our fists while he pressed record, and he said the wheel would turn for us if we were loud enough. Sion Pritchard, who had lost two fingers to a tub at the face, sang bass with no music in him at all. Mrs Gwen Price brought scones and cried into the tape so you could hear her sniff.

When the closure notices came in May, Idris rewound the tape to the start and played it through the speaker, the hiss sounding like rain on a tin roof. Then he held the cassette up to the window, where the red glow from the coke ovens was coming in, and said a thing recorded twice is only half lost. He cut the brown tape into lengths with his pocket knife and gave one piece to each of us.

Mine is in my wallet still, behind the bus pass. It has his humming on it, and forty seconds of Sion singing a hymn nobody in the valley was meant to hear in full. When the wind is up over the tips I play it, and what I hear is not the machine at all but the wheel turning, slow and patient, the way it did before any of us were born.