Singer with watercolour music notes on upper arm

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A black and grey profile of a woman with curly dark hair singing into a microphone forms the centre of the design. Around her, loose watercolour splashes in blue, pink, green and purple run down the arm, with musical notes and a treble clef scattered through the colour. The upper edge of the frame shows other black linework, and a floral-patterned top sits at the right.

Upper arm Microphone Music note Treble clef Watercolour splash Curly hair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gutting shed smells of diesel and salt by five, and you are still humming the chorus Dilys sang the night before the Gannet Rose went out. Nobody on Skerrow fleet has heard her voice since the engine failed on the bar, but the tune keeps coming back to you the way gulls return to a scrubbed deck.

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Dilys sang through a tin microphone she had wired to the wheelhouse radio, so her voice carried over the harbour wall to every boat coming in. Skippers cut their engines to listen. She taught you the verses in the cold months, her notes running like the blue and green spray that came over the bow when the swell was up, and you learned the high line of it before you could read a single bar of music.

The morning you open her locker, the microphone is wrapped in oilcloth beneath a stack of tide tables. On the back of one, in pencil, she has written: sing it to the water, not the men. You wait for slack tide, take the Gannet Rose out alone, and switch the radio on with your hand shaking on the knob. Your first note is thin and cracked, but past the bar a trawler answers with three short blasts of its horn, then another, then the whole fleet in turn.

When the light comes grey over the breakwater, the sound has gone out across the water and nobody has asked you to stop. You tie the boat up, coil the cable, and tuck the pencilled note into your jacket pocket, where it stays dry against your ribs all the way up the slipway.