Fine line black tattoo of a small guitar on the side of an ankle, photographed in black and white against crumpled bedsheets.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small guitar outline on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A bare foot and ankle rest on crumpled fabric, with a small tattoo on the side of the ankle. The thin black linework shows a long neck with three horizontal strings and a rounded body. The photograph is in black and white, so the tattoo sits clearly against the pale skin, with soft folds of fabric filling the background.

Fine line Ankle Guitar Line drawing

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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

Sit down, the lot of you, and stop pretending you don't remember the music room. Forty years on and the radiators still knock the same tune. I'll tell it the way Mr Pollard told it to me, which is to say badly and with the kettle on.

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The school had one guitar that year, a secondhand thing with a cracked belly, and it lived in the cupboard behind the timpani. Six strings on paper. In practice three, because Dougie Fenn had snapped the others trying to tune it up to a Clash record and nobody had the fourteen pence for replacements. Mr Pollard said a guitar with three honest strings was worth ten with lies on them. We thought he was soft in the head.

Then in the spring term the Ellery twins were put down for the talent show, and Carol Ashby, who had never once spoken above a murmur in assembly, asked to borrow it. She played three chords on those three strings, one of them wrong, and the whole hall went quiet the way a church does when the bell stops. Nobody clapped until she'd finished, and that was the turn of it, though none of us knew it then.

So when the Ellery twins came back last Saturday with a box of old programmes, you'll forgive me for going soft. Carol's gone now, and that guitar is in a skip somewhere outside Barnsley, but I've still got my three strings and a fair idea of how many chords a person needs. Pick up whatever you've been carrying and play it, even if it's flat. Especially if it's flat.