Blue and grey sketch-style guitars tattooed across a man's upper back, with a black hexagon pattern band on the shoulder and upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sketched guitars across a back

Geometric · Back · Colour · Photo

A large back piece shows several electric and acoustic guitars drawn in loose, overlapping sketch lines with blue and grey wash shading. Faint patent-style printed text and numbers appear among the guitar outlines, and splashes of ink add texture at the left edge. A separate black hexagon pattern band wraps the shoulder and upper arm on the right of the frame.

Geometric Back Shoulder Upper arm Guitar Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The third guitar came off the bulkhead the night the river flooded the towpath, and I still had Dad's sketches tucked behind the stove where the damp couldn't reach them. He drew the way other men swore, fast and without apology: an electric body traced over an old patent for a pickup, the lines doubled where his hand had shaken on the bad days.

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Mr Ansell from the chandlery wanted to buy the lot for scrap brass and a bottle of rum. I said the paper wasn't for sale. He tapped the numbers printed under the sketches and said a patent runs out eventually, lass, and then it's just a drawing. I told him Dad never once in forty years believed a thing was finished until it had been played in the wrong key at least twice.

So we took the barge up to Hartlow Lock on the last day of April, with the guitars lashed under a tarpaulin and the hexagon-tiled cabin floor rattling under my boots. The lock-keeper's boy strummed an open E as we passed, and the note hung over the water, a little flat, a little out of tune, exactly the sound Dad had spent his last winter trying to draw.

I pulled the sketches out and laid them across the roof in the wind. The ink ran where the spray caught them, blue wash bleeding into grey, and for a moment the guitars looked as if they were drifting downstream on their own. Ansell could keep his scrap. I let the pages go one at a time, and the river took them, and that was the only paper I ever meant to lose.