Two solid black violin f-hole shapes tattooed side by side on the back of a person's neck.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Twin violin f-holes on the back of the neck

Neck · Black and grey · Photo

The image shows the back of a person's neck, with two solid black violin f-hole shapes tattooed symmetrically, one on each side of the centre. Each shape has a curved upper hook and a rounded lower curl, with clean edges and no shading. The skin is pale and the background is softly blurred, with a patterned blue and white top at the bottom of the frame.

Neck Music

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The spruce came down in the February gale, the one that took the chapel weathervane and half the Hollins barn roof. Dad said it had stood on the ridge above Wendle Wood for two hundred years and would not be wasted. He carried the billet down on his shoulder, swearing the whole way, and set it across two trestles in the workshop where the stove never quite reached the corners.

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I was the one who cut the f-holes. He didn't trust my hands with the scroll, but he let me mark the places with a pencil and a steel rule, then work the small knife in until the curls came clean. Each hook had to mirror the other exactly, he said, or the top would sing lopsided. I kept my strokes shallow and my breath short, afraid of splitting the grain. When the second opening came free, I felt the whole body of the wood go still, as if it were listening.

The fiddle went to a man from Ashford who paid in coins and never once tuned it. The night before he collected it, I took the instrument into Wendle Wood and drew the bow across under the oaks. The sound went out through the two dark mouths and came back off the trunks a moment late, lower and rounder, as if the trees had learned the tune from me and were practising it for themselves.

In the morning the bench was bare and the bow lay on the doorstep, rosin still pale on the hair. Dad didn't ask where I had been. He just filled the kettle and set it on the stove, and when the wind came down off the ridge that week I heard the wood answering from the trees.