Traditional style tattoo of a vintage microphone framed by two red roses and grey leaves on an upper arm.

Vintage microphone and roses on an upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A vintage ribbed microphone sits at the centre of the design, shaded in grey and black with highlights along its grille. Two full red roses with cream highlights and dark outlines frame it at the top and bottom, with grey-green leaves and scrollwork filling the gaps. The bold black outlines and flat red colour give the piece a classic flash look, set against a close crop of skin.

Traditional Upper arm Microphone Rose Leaves Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferry was late again, so the dance was held in the church hall with the chairs pushed back and only half the lamps lit. Mrs Gillies had carried the microphone over from the hotel in a cardboard box wrapped in a tea towel, and it sat on its stand like a grey pudding with its ribs showing. Nobody on Coll had sung into anything fancier than a tin cup.

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I was sixteen and had been asked to sing because Morag Ferguson had lost her voice to a cold and the Mackinnon boys had gone across to the mainland for parts. My hands still smelt of diesel from the pier. I stepped where the stage used to be, pulled the mic down a notch, and heard my own breath come back at me through the grille, louder than I expected, like someone breathing in the next room.

Mrs Gillies kept a rose bush in a jam jar by the urn, red as a pillar box, and she told me to take one for luck. I tucked it behind the stand. When I sang the first line of the song my father used to sing at the pier gate, the old men stopped stacking chairs. By the second verse someone had dropped a bloom at my feet, then another, and the boards in front of me were nearly red.

The ferry horn sounded out in the bay, too late for anyone who wanted to leave. I finished the song anyway. When I looked up, Dougie was at the back with his cap in both hands, nodding slowly, the way you nod at weather you have decided to like. Nobody asked me to sing again that year. Nobody needed to.