Black line drawing of a vinyl record half-turned into a sound wave, shown as a tattoo design on a plain white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Vinyl record and sound wave design

Black and grey · Flash

A black and white drawing of a vinyl record on its right side, with its grooves and label shaded in sharp, scratchy strokes. A wavy line of increasing and decreasing amplitude runs from the record's edge to both sides of the frame, linking the record to a sound wave. The bold outlines and solid black areas sit against an empty white background with no body part visible.

Music Line art

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and mind the cold tea. My grandmother's grandmother was a salvage hand on the old Thames barrier, back when the water had come up over Greenwich and the people who stayed lived on the high ground by the dome. She told me this, and I tell it to you the way it was told to her.

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There was a girl called Ysolde Obi who kept the last working turntable in the district, bolted to a crate of brass fittings. Every low tide she dragged blank discs out of the mud, black and cracked, and cut them with a needle made from a fallen aerial. Nobody wanted music any more. The sea wanted everything. But on the night the signal came in from the far relay, a long wavering hum that rose and fell like someone breathing under a blanket, Ysolde set the needle down and let the hum carve itself into the groove.

It took her eleven nights. The wave swung up, dropped away, then climbed again, and each swing scratched a little deeper into the black until the disc was a record. When she played it back, the hum came out as a voice, a man's voice, reading out tide heights for a harbour that had not existed for two hundred years. Her neighbours wept. Some of them walked down to the water and listened there.

Ysolde gave the disc to the sea on the last morning of that winter, wrapped in oilcloth and tied to a gull's float. Now, if you go down at low tide and wait, you can hear the hum rising under the shingle. Say the names along with it. That is all the tale asks of you, and the water will do the rest.