Black and grey tattoo on an upper arm showing a radio tower with a red heart, lightning bolts and a city silhouette inside a ring of lettering reading Do What You Love and Love What You Do, with the

Radio tower and heart with Do What You Love text

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A circular design centres on a black silhouette of a city skyline below a radio tower with a small red heart at its top, flanked by two lightning bolts and faint concentric sound rings. Bold black capitals form the ring, reading Do What You Love above and Love What You Do below, with the word Love picked out in red on each side. The shading is soft and grainy in the background rings and solid in the skyline, and the red accents sit against a neutral skin tone.

Traditional Lettering Upper arm Heart Lightning City skyline Lettering Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Marrow Kell had kept the transmitter on the hill above Tanner's Reach for nineteen winters, and in all that time nobody had asked him to play a song. The station's licence was up in March. The council wanted the mast for a mobile phone company, and the new flats going up below had already crowded the old signal path. Kell climbed the ladder every night anyway, because the valves still hummed and the cold iron still rang under his boots.

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On the last Thursday a girl came up the hill with a biscuit tin and a cassette player. Her name was Ada Fenwick, she was nine, and her grandmother had read the Saturday request show before she lost her voice. Ada wanted to say one thing into the microphone. Kell told her the signal only reached sets tuned to 88.3, which was perhaps forty people, mostly fishermen and the bedridden. She said that was forty more than had heard her at school.

He let her talk. She spoke about a dog called Biscuit, about the red bus that never stopped at the bottom of Gaol Lane, and about how the city looked like a black comb when the lights went out. Kell pressed the switch. Down in the flats a kettle clicked on, and a window opened. Someone in a dressing gown leaned out to see where the voice was coming from.

The licence lapsed at midnight, and the mast went dark the next morning. The biscuit tin stayed on the bottom rung of the ladder, and inside it was a folded note in pencil: Do what you love. Kell read it twice, then walked down the hill with the city lights blinking below him like something he had only just learned to hear.