Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stylised bass guitar with musical notes

Black and grey · Flash

A black silhouette design of a bass guitar, with its headstock at the top and a series of musical notes and stave marks running along the neck. Flowing curls and tapered swirls form the body and lower edge. The artwork is solid black on white with no greys or colour.

Guitar Musical note Music Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bass had sat in the pawnshop window on Kirkgate for eleven months, wedged between a toaster and a box of brass door handles, and Dessie Marr walked past it every Tuesday pretending he wasn't looking. The ticket was still taped to the headstock, in the shopkeeper's loopy hand, the price written in pencil and crossed out twice.

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He paid it in coins he had saved from a summer of clearing gutters for the Pakistani grocer's widow on Harrow Street, counting them out on the counter while the shopkeeper pretended not to hurry him. Outside, he held the case against his hip like a sleeping child. On the bus home he opened it once, just to check the strings were still there, and the old notes Dessie had scratched along the neck in biro for the lads' band, all those years ago, caught the light through the bus window and ran up towards the tuning pegs like a hurried tune.

That night he sat in the back room of the Crown, where the landlord let them rehearse for free if they cleared the glasses. Nobody else came. He played the bassline from 'Mill Road Blues' twice through, then a third time slower, letting the low swirl at the bottom of the body hum against his knee.

On his way out, the landlord asked whether he'd found what he came for. Dessie shrugged, tucked the case under his arm and said he'd only wanted to hear it again.