Close view of a tattooed forearm and hand resting on a gold guitar, with a traditional style skull and rose design on the forearm and small lettering on the knuckles.

Tattooed forearm and hand on a guitar

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A tattooed forearm and hand rest on the body of a gold-finished electric guitar, with a sticker showing a red-crested cartoon bird and partial lettering on the instrument. The forearm carries a skull and rose design with red and green colour, shaded mainly in grey and black, and the hand has small tattoos across the knuckles and the back of the hand. The shallow focus and warm stage lighting leave the background dark and the tattoos as the clear subject.

Traditional Forearm Hand Skull Rose Lettering Hand Guitar

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The guitar came off the coach at Holyhead with its case already unlatched, which is the first thing I noticed, because nobody opens a case at a border unless they want it looked at. Its owner was on the phone to someone called Dee, repeating that the bird was fine, only the corners had gone soft. I asked him to lay the instrument on the steel table. The gold finish had worn to brass where an arm would rest, and a sticker of a red-crested cartoon bird with a microphone in its beak had been peeled and pressed back down so many times it had lost its shine.

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Nothing to declare, he said. Just the guitar and the bird. I opened the lid of the case anyway and found a shirt folded around a sheet of tracing paper. On it, in blue biro, someone had drawn a skull with a rose pushed through its teeth. Beside the petals was written red, beside the leaves green, and beside the bone, in a looser hand, keep the grey heavy, Dee says.

I asked whose hand had drawn it. He took a long time to answer, looking at the bird rather than at me. Dee's, he said. She does all the sheets for the lads. I folded the tracing paper back into the shirt exactly as it had been and wrote nothing on my form but the guitar's serial number. The barrier lifted. Through the coach window I could see the ferry lights coming on across the water, and somewhere on the Welsh side a woman was drawing another rose she would never see finished.