Teal and black neo-traditional tattoo of a typewriter with piano keys and music notes on paper, placed on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Typewriter with piano keys on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A typewriter with piano keys along its base and a sheet of paper bearing musical notes rising from the carriage. The outlines are bold and black, with grey shading on the platen and the keys, and the body of the machine is filled with flat turquoise ink. The design is centred on the forearm and photographed straight on against a plain skin background.

Neo-trad Forearm Music note Sheet music

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mabel Trant carried the typewriter into Pell's Music Rooms on a wet Tuesday in March, holding it against her hip the way she might carry a baby, and set it on the counter without a word of apology. Walter Pell wiped his hands on his apron. The case had been painted a turquoise that was flaking at the corners, and where the letter keys should have been sat a row of ivory piano keys, yellowed and chipped at the tips.

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"My brother did that before he went to Dagenham," she said. "He said if I wanted to write songs and couldn't read a note, I should let the machine do the reading. Each key strikes a note instead of a letter. Only the carriage sticks, and when it jumps it rings like a bell in the wrong place."

Walter lifted the carriage and found the trouble in a bent spring no bigger than a hairpin. He worked on it through his dinner while she sat on the stool by the window and typed with two fingers, slowly, a hymn for her mother's birthday. The shop filled with a thin, uneven melody that stopped and started like a tram on wet rails. When a sheet slid out from under the platen, five lines of notes ran across it in neat black ink, one quaver for every letter she had struck.

He handed the spring back to her, fixed. She fed in a clean sheet and typed her own name, then sat very still when the first bar appeared. Walter sat down at the upright in the corner and played it, and the four notes were the opening of a waltz his late wife used to hum over the sink. Mabel folded the paper twice and slid it into her coat pocket. "I'll bring you the second verse," she said, "if the machine will let me."