Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a vinyl record on a forearm, photographed against a dark background.

Vinyl record tattoo on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A vinyl record is tattooed on the forearm, shown as a central circle with a small spindle hole and a label area. The grooves are built from fine stippled dots and short lines, with darker shading toward the outer edge and lighter tones near the centre. The ink is black and grey only, and the design sits centred on the arm against a plain black background.

Dotwork Forearm Music

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gramophone bolted to the wheelhouse table plays only one record without skipping, and you have been told by three skippers now that it is the only thing keeping the deckhands from quarrelling. Its sleeve went missing somewhere between Hull and the Dogger Bank, so nobody knows the band. You know only the opening bars by heart: a clarinet that sounds as if it is crying into a tin cup.

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On the Sunday a force seven came in from the north-east and the galley floor took to sliding. Tam, who has fished these grounds since before you were born, stood with one hand on the rail and the other on the record while the boat rolled. He said the grooves wear toward the middle, which is why the last minute always sounds thinner than the first. You asked him how he knew. He tapped the dust in the lines with a fingernail and said the sea had told him, and that was the end of the conversation.

That night the engine dropped to a mutter and the radio went to hiss. You lifted the arm and set the needle down, and the old clarinet came up through the crackle like a light through fog. Nobody spoke. The men sat with their boots steaming on the stove rail and listened to the scratches, which were the only part of the record that was truly theirs.

In the morning you took carpenter's pencil to the blank label and wrote the boat's name on it, small, so whoever took the next watch would know whose music it was.