Colourful traditional-style tattoo of a retro microphone with lightning bolts above a record player, on the upper arm.

Retro microphone and record player on arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A bold tattoo of a retro microphone with yellow lightning bolts across its grille, sitting above a turntable with a vinyl record labelled 30T CRAB. Thick dark outlines frame the shapes, with blue, lilac and pink shading on the metal and soft grey-blue highlights. Partial tattoos in red and yellow are visible at the top left and bottom right edges of the frame.

Traditional Upper arm Microphone Lightning bolt

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The potatoes had been sliding across the galley floor since four, and Dessie Rourke had stopped chasing them. He braced one boot against the stove rail and kept his free hand on the ship's microphone, bolted to the bulkhead beside the tannoy switch. Outside, the North Sea had turned the colour of wet slate and the trawler climbed each swell like a tired horse. Somewhere above the wheelhouse a lamp buzzed and died.

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The record was his brother's doing. Tommy had cut it in a back room in Hull the winter before he went ashore for good, a dozen crab-boat songs pressed onto a single disc, and he'd scrawled 30T CRAB across the label in biro so nobody would mistake it for anything else. Dessie had carried it aboard in an oilskin pocket. Now he lifted the arm, dropped the needle, and let the turntable hum under the thud of the hull.

The lightning came as the first verse began, a white split over the mast that turned the galley bright as a photograph. Every light on the ship flickered, and for one second the record skipped. Dessie didn't flinch. He leaned into the mic and sang the chorus badly, the way Tommy always had, and through the tannoy he heard the bunks answer, one voice after another, rough and off-key from below deck.

When the skipper's voice finally crackled down from the wheelhouse, telling him to turn that racket off before they lost the boat, Dessie only smiled at the spinning label. The needle found the groove again, and the storm went on without them.