Black lettering tattoo of song lyrics with small music notes running down a lower leg, in a lettering style and placed on the calf.

Song lyrics tattoo on a lower leg

Lettering · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

Four lines of song lyrics run down the skin in black ink, mixing a handwritten script with block capitals for the line HOW DID YOU LOVE? Small music notes sit between the lines, and a partly cut-off band credit appears at the lower right. The ink is crisp and even on a plain, slightly pink background, with the text set diagonally across the limb.

Lettering Calf Lyric Quote Music note Script Text

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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

You have been scrubbing the same pan since the second watch, because the sea has gone flat and nothing else in the galley needs you. Someone has left the radio on the shelf above the sink, tuned to a station that keeps breaking up somewhere past the Pentland Firth, and between the crackle you catch half a chorus about a man asking how you loved. You missed the start of it. You always miss the start of things on this boat.

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Bren comes down soaked to the elbows and asks what's for tea. You tell him it's mince, same as Tuesday, and he laughs and says the sea isn't interested in our menus. He perches on the locker and hums the bit he half knows, badly, the line about nobody coming back in one piece, and you tell him to stop before the crew start taking it as an omen. He grins. He knows you don't believe in omens. You believe in the tins on the top shelf and the tide tables pinned by the door.

Before dawn the wind rises and the hull begins its heavy, groaning roll. The radio goes dead with a last spit of static. You hold the rail, count the soup pots that have not gone over, and think about the lad's mother in Wick who wrote asking you to keep an eye on him. That night you answer her on the back of a laminated menu card: He eats well, he sings badly, and he is still here.

In the morning Bren comes in dry for once and asks you to write the words down so he can get them right. You copy them out in your careful hand, the question in capitals because it is the only part you are sure of, and slide the card across the steel counter beside his bowl of porridge.