Ink drawing of a flying bird whose body is a treble clef and whose wings are staff lines and musical notes, shown as a tattoo design without a body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bird formed from music notes and a treble clef

Black and grey · Flash

A bird in flight is built from musical notes, with a large treble clef forming its body and staff lines sweeping out into its wings. The linework is loose and sketchy, with soft grey and brown wash shading along the wings and tail. The bird faces left on a plain pale background, with notes trailing from the wings and tail.

Bird Music note Treble clef Staff lines Musical notation

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

14th January. The snow has buried the lower windows of the Hollin Arms and the landlord says the road to Settle will stay shut until Thursday at the earliest. I have three quills, one bottle of ink gone thick with cold, and a stack of blank staves ruled by my father's hand. Mrs Pargeter wants her hymn copied fair for Sunday before the choir can sing it from the wrong key.

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Yesterday a sparrow came in through the broken shutter of the back parlour and perched on the piano lid. It was not a sparrow, though, once it began to sing. Every phrase rose and curled back down the way a clef does, and I found myself scratching it onto the nearest page before the notes could fly off. The landlord's boy swears it is the same bird that sat on the ostler's shoulder at breakfast, but he is nine and believes in many things.

I have spent the afternoon with the sheets spread across the bar. The bird's song, written out, has a strange shape: a long descending run in the bass, then a tangle of quick notes that turn back on themselves like smoke. When I drew the clef around it, the whole page began to look like a bird folded in the middle, wings lifted, tail trailing towards the floor. Mr Ashworth said it looked like a bird with its head full of music. I told him it looked like a melody that had decided to leave.

This morning the shutter stood open and the sky had cleared to a hard blue. The bird sat on the sill, sang the last bar once more, and went. I copied it into the margin of the hymn, under Mrs Pargeter's careful title, and blotted the page twice. The choir will sing the wrong tune on Sunday, I expect. I have decided to keep the true one for myself.