Pencil drawing of a tattoo design with three roses, a vintage microphone, piano keys, a guitar headstock and music staves, in a realistic sepia-toned style.

Roses, microphone and piano keys design

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows three realistic roses in the centre, with a vintage microphone, a row of piano keys and a guitar headstock labelled Gibson around them. Music staves, notes and a treble clef fill the background, and handwritten script lyrics run down the left side. The work is finely shaded in pencil with soft grey tones and dark accents, set against an aged, sepia-toned paper background.

Realism Rose Microphone Music note Treble clef Sheet music Script Lyric

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

Everybody on the fourteenth floor of Harker Tower knew the microphone was down the bin chute, though nobody said so to the housing man with his clipboard. It was an old silver thing with a grille like a cake tin. Tobi Marsh had dropped it there the week his mother's flat was re-let, because he said it sang when nobody held it. On still nights you could hear it humming through the concrete.

Keep reading

Mrs Idowu kept the community room on the ground floor, with an upright piano whose keys stuck and one that rang like a bell. Every evening at six she played the same slow tune, the way you'd walk someone home. She grew dark red roses in the planters by the bins, the colour of old tea, and said they only came up when the music was right. The council sent a man to cut them back twice.

Tobi came back in the autumn with a guitar across his back, the headstock chipped, GIBSON still readable in gold along the top. He had sheet music folded in his coat, the pages gone soft from carrying. He did not ask anyone for the microphone. He reached down the chute up to the shoulder and came out with it grey with dust, then climbed all fourteen flights with it under his arm, stopping on every landing to tune the strings.

On the roof he set the microphone on a crate and sang the tune his mother used to hum over the washing line, the one Mrs Idowu had been playing all along. Far below, the piano answered on its bell key. By morning the roses in the planters had opened in the night, and someone had pinned a treble clef to the stairwell door, its notes climbing towards the roof as if they meant to follow him.