Black ink drawing of a bass clef with two dots and a long stroke extending above and below, on a white background.

Bass clef design in black line

Black and grey · Flash

A bold black line drawing of a bass clef, with its spiral curl, two dots to the right and a long tapering stroke extending above and below the main shape. The linework is hand-drawn with slight variation in weight, and the design is shown in solid black on a plain white background with no shading or colour. The composition is centred and vertical, with the clef filling most of the frame.

Bass clef Music Musical notation Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The piano at Gull Cottage had been under a dust sheet since the spring the sea came up the lane, and nobody in Skerrow would lift it. Mrs Ada Penhale kept the boarding house on the cliff road and charged a shilling less for rooms with a view of the water, because the water kept the lodgers awake and they liked to complain about something cheaper than the bill.

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A tuner called Thomas Quick came off the Penzance train one October with a leather roll of tools and a bad cough. He wanted the room with the piano. Ada told him the instrument was out of tune, and he said that was the reason he had come. He lifted the sheet and found the keys swollen with salt and the bass strings gone green, but he sat down anyway. The first low note he struck made the window glass hum in its frame, and every gull on the roof rose at once.

He worked nights for a fortnight. Each morning the bass strings were tighter than he had left them, and the damp had gone out of the wood. On the last night Ada came down in her coat and found him not playing but drawing on the back of a bill of fare: a great curling key with two dots beside it. 'That's the sea's own sign,' he said. 'Old tuners used to draw it on the lid so the water knew whose instrument it was.' She asked if that was true. He shrugged and said it had worked on him.

In the morning the tide was out further than anyone had seen it. Thomas Quick was gone, his cough with him, and the bill of fare lay on the keyboard with the drawing turned face up. Ada played the bottom octave once, slowly, and the cliffs gave it back. Nobody in Skerrow has covered the piano since.