Black line tattoo of a snare drum with scattered numbers on the upper arm, drawn in a fine line style with hatched shading.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Snare drum with numbers on upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A detailed black linework drawing of a snare drum sits on the upper arm, with its strainer, tension lugs and wire snares shown in outline. Small numbers including 10, 2, 88, 51, 7, 12 and 84 are scattered around the drum, and the drum shell is shaded with fine parallel hatching. The tattoo is shown in a close, straight-on photograph against a cream surface, with part of another tattoo visible at the top right edge.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tobias, the drum came back from Hollis's yard this morning, wrapped in tarred canvas and smelling of paraffin. He has fitted new calfskin, the proper sort, and tightened every lug with a key while I hovered over him like a gull at the fishmonger's. He said the tension mattered more than the wood. I said nothing, which you will tell me is a first.

Keep reading

Dad chalked the numbers on the shell himself before he varnished it. Ten and two for the tide at the slipway, eighty-eight for the winter the Mary Ellen went down on the bar, fifty-one for Gran's house on Fore Street, seven and twelve for the bells that called the boats in. Eighty-four was the last boat in, the one he never once spoke of, and the reason he stopped playing the Thursday market. I used to think the numbers were a code. They are only a man keeping count of what he could not mend.

Hollis asked which numbers I wanted kept. I told him all of them. Then I walked down the harbour steps to the wall and tapped the new skin with my thumb, and it gave a dull, honest note, the same as the old one, and a gull lifted off the rail as if I had called it by name.

Come home at Easter and bring your bad knees. We'll play it on the slipway for whoever is left to listen.

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