Red line drawing of a violin with curling scroll flourishes on a white background, shown as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Violin with swirling flourishes

Colour · Flash

The image shows a violin drawn in a single deep red ink on a plain white background, with its neck and scroll at the top. Strings and the body outline are drawn in smooth, continuous lines, with decorative swirls extending from the scroll and around the lower bout. The composition is a tall, centred vertical design with the flourishes balancing the instrument's shape.

String Scroll Swirl Flourish Music

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fiddle came ashore at Skerra Haven in a crab pot, wrapped in oilcloth, with its strings still tight. Nobody in the fleet would say who had set it there. Old Mairi Dunn took it up, found the scroll carved like a wave curling back on itself, and tuned it by ear to the creak of the Brightwater's hull.

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That winter the herring went deep and the boats came home light. Mairi played on the quay each evening, and the men said the notes drew the shoals in closer to the nets. The skipper of the Ellen Rae laughed at this until his nets came up so heavy the winch snapped. After that he sent his boy down with a bottle of rum every Friday.

In March a northerly came in without warning. The boats were out past the Stacks, and the fleet made for the gap as the sea went white. Mairi carried the fiddle to the harbour wall and played the slow reel her mother had taught her, the one with the falling bar at the end. The lamps in the boats swung towards the sound, one after another, and each came through the gap.

When the last boat tied up, Mairi's bow hand was split to the bone and the strings had gone slack and silver. She hung the fiddle on a nail above the net loft. The fishermen still say that if you stand at the wall in a flat calm and listen, the strings hum a little, as though they are counting the boats in.