Black traditional tattoo of a skeleton hand gripping a cassette tape with three arrows above it, placed on the front of a thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skeleton hand holding a cassette on a thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A bold skeletal hand grips a cassette tape with three upward arrows floating above it, and ink drips run from one edge of the tape. The design uses thick black outlines and solid black fills with no grey shading, and it sits centrally on the upper thigh against a plain background. Part of another tattoo is visible at the lower edge of the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down under the awning, there, where the drip doesn't reach. It's been raining on Hessle Road since Tuesday and the gutters have given up. I've told this one to nobody but the gulls, so mind your manners.

Keep reading

Dennis Okonedo ran the tape stall by the fish market, the one with the sagging trestle and the handwritten sign that said ALL PLAYS OR YOUR MONEY BACK. Nobody believed the sign. In 1986 a girl came by with a shoebox of cassettes, each labelled in pen with a song and a date, and asked him to fix the one she loved best. A portable player had chewed it to ribbons. Dennis said he couldn't. She left it with him anyway, along with the shoebox, and walked out into the rain without an umbrella.

Dennis wound the tape back with a pencil, the way his father had taught him, and a sound came out of it that was nothing like music: a slow hiss, then three rising notes like someone climbing stairs, then silence. When he held it up to the light, the brown ribbon had spooled itself into a loop shaped like a hand, bony and open, gripping the spools. Every time it rained, ink ran down the plastic shell as if it were weeping.

She never came back for it. Forty years on, the stall is a phone case shop and the shoebox is in my cupboard. Some nights I pull the tape out, wind it on a pencil, and wait for those three rising notes. They always come. Then the hand lets go, and the tape goes quiet, which is how I know she's heard it.

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