Ink drawing of a songbird in flight, its body formed from a treble clef and musical notes, with wings of stave lines and floating notes, on a plain white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bird made of music notes and a treble clef

Black and grey · Flash

A sketched songbird in mid-flight, with its head turned to the left and a small beak and eye. Its body is built from a large treble clef and a trail of quavers and crotchets, while its wings are made of five-line staves with notes drifting off the tips. The linework is soft and sepia-toned with light wash shading, set against a plain white background.

Bird Musical note Treble clef Music Wing Songbird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bird came down through the beeches on the morning the schoolmaster's fiddle cracked, and it perched on the gatepost at Low Ashby and sang a tune nobody in the village had heard before. Mrs Pell swore it was made of ink. Her boy climbed the wall to look and came back saying the thing had a treble clef for a body, curled round its belly like a sleeping cat, and that its wings were ruled with lines like the paper in the schoolroom, with notes sliding off the tips.

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The men tried to catch it. Tam Greaves, who kept the bees at the forest's edge, strung a net of horsehair between the hazels and sat up all night with a lantern. At first light the net held nothing but quavers, black and light, that rattled like hail when he shook them loose. The bird was on the church roof, singing, and the rooks had gone quiet to listen. Nobody in Low Ashby had sung since the fiddle broke, and the bells had been rung by rote for a month.

Ada, the woodcutter's girl, went up to the hazels at dusk with a bucket of ash and her mother's old song in her mouth, the one about the miller's daughter who walked out to the weir. She had not sung it since the funeral. She got the first line wrong, then the second line better. Above her a crotchet dropped out of the sky and landed on her shoulder, warm as a coin. The bird came down to the lowest branch and answered her, note for note, and then it sang the verse she had forgotten.

By Lammas the whole valley was singing again, badly at first and then well, and the bird had flown over the hill to find some other village that had forgotten how. Ada kept the crotchet in a tin on the windowsill. Some evenings, when the window was open, it hummed to itself, and she hummed back, and the two of them kept the tune between them.