Colour tattoo of three stacked cassette tapes in purple, red, yellow, green and blue with black outlines, on the upper arm.

Three cassette tapes on an upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

Three cassette tapes are stacked vertically, each with a different body colour in purple, red, yellow, green and blue. Black outlines define the shapes, and the tapes have flat, even colour with small highlights on the labels and reels. The tattoo sits on the upper arm and is shown against a striped top, with the design centred and fully in frame.

Upper arm Music

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in our house ever owned a record player that worked, so Mum taught us to make mixtapes off the radio instead, one thumb on the record key and the other ready to stop it before the DJ talked over the chorus. I was nine. Dawn was eleven and bossy about it. By the time we reached the third cassette, the kitchen smelt of hot plastic and tinned tomato soup, and she had decided the blue one was cursed.

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Dawn moved to Carlisle the summer she turned seventeen, taking the purple tape in her rucksack and leaving the red and yellow ones on the windowsill of my room. I didn't play them. Their labels curled in the damp, and I kept picking at the corners the way you pick at a scab you know you shouldn't. Then a padded envelope arrived on a Tuesday with no letter, only a fresh C60 with one track listed in biro: Side A, track one, the song from the radio the night she first left.

I wound the blue tape through the old stereo until the reels clicked. The song came in thin and bright, a little wobbly, and under the guitar I could hear her breathing and the scrape of a chair. She had recorded the whole thing from her bedroom floor. At the end she said my name, then 'press stop, you daft thing', and I laughed so hard I missed the button.

I rewound it three times that night. Then I wrote on the inlay, in pencil, the way she had taught me: track one, from Dawn, and beneath it my own track, the one I had been saving for when she came home.