Colour and grey tattoo of a vintage microphone surrounded by music notes and a treble clef on the calf, set against an orange splash.

Vintage microphone with music notes on a calf

Realism · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A vintage microphone with a grille of horizontal bars fills the centre of the image, wrapped in curling wire and decorated with floating music notes and a treble clef. The microphone is shaded in greys and blacks with highlights, while a loose orange splash behind it provides the only strong colour. The tattoo sits vertically on a lower leg against a dark background, with the design filling most of the frame.

Realism Calf Microphone Music note Treble clef Wire

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Brother Anselm,

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The microphone came up the valley road on the back of a Bedford van, wrapped in a horse blanket and smelling of diesel and wet cardboard. Prior Hilary had the lay brothers carry it into the refectory as though it were a relic, which in its way it was. The man from the London label wanted our plainsong caught without the stone's echo, so he hung the thing from the oak beam on a length of cable that curled down like a dropped rosary, and told us to sing as though no one were listening.

We sang the Compline psalms three times over, and each time the great silver grille seemed to take the breath out of the room and hand it back warmer. Brother Oswin, who has not been allowed near the choir stalls since the spring, kept coughing into his sleeve, and the man swore at the microphone as if it had done it. Then, on the fourth take, a wren got in through the broken pane above the lectern and began to sing over the top of us. Nobody moved. The man's needle stayed steady, and the sunlight through the orange glass turned the whole room the colour of a banked fire.

He has taken the tape to London. He says the wren is the best thing on it, and that the label will put our names on the sleeve. I told him the names are not ours to sell. He laughed and said that was exactly why they would sell.

Your brother in the cold, Brother Clement