Black and red bass clef tattoo with a guitar neck, sketched hand and splatter details on a person's upper back, in a dotwork and watercolour style.

Bass clef and guitar neck on upper back

Dotwork · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large black bass clef sits at the centre of the design, with a sketched guitar neck and hand rising above it on the upper back. Red watercolour-style washes, splatter marks and halftone dots surround the clef, and small lines of tattooed text sit beneath it. The composition is loose and layered, with fine linework and dotted shading balancing the solid black of the clef.

Dotwork Back Bass clef Guitar Hand Music Splatter Dot Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and let Mrs Hadley have her sherry in peace. This is the story of the wedding at the Co-op hall in Thornhill, the summer the band was three men, one borrowed amplifier and a bass player called Terence Mold who could not be trusted with a fork.

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Terence wrote the first dance on the back of a paper napkin with a biro that had run dry twice. He drew a bass clef on it, big and black, the curl of it like a sleeping cat, and beside it a guitar neck with Gil's hand sketched over the frets, because Gil never let go of a chord once he had found it. At the top table the vicar's wife knocked over a jug of cordial, and it bled red across the napkin, right through the clef. Terence said that was the mark of a real song, a bit of weather in it.

The bride had asked for the one tune nobody in the room knew, a slow thing her grandfather used to hum while he mended fences. They played it badly. The bass line came out smudged, the chords slid about, and the stain spread over the words he had scribbled underneath, words nobody could read by then. But when Terence dropped his low E down into the floorboards, the bride's father, who had sat at the back all afternoon with his arms folded, got up and walked to the middle of the room without a word.

Terence never did find that napkin in the hall bins, though he went looking. Years later a woman who had been a flower girl told me the band played the song twice that night, and the old man danced the second time with his eyes shut. Keep it low, Terence used to say, and it will carry all the way to the back row.