Ink drawing of a songbird in flight, with its body and wings formed from musical notes and a treble clef, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement visible.

Bird made of music notes and a treble clef

Black and grey · Flash

A songbird in side profile, with its body and tail built from musical notes and a large treble clef at its chest. Its wings trail loose staff lines and scattered notes that fade into soft grey wash. The linework is sketchy and expressive, with brown and black ink on a pale background, and the bird fills the left and centre of the frame.

Bird Music note Treble clef Staff lines Wing Songbird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bird comes back every morning to the sill above your desk, and every morning it sings the same four notes before the bell for Prime. You have tried to write them down for a week. Your quill keeps producing dots that look like spilt ink, and Brother Aldo, who keeps the armarium and has opinions about everything, says a sparrow has no business in the scriptorium and you have no business listening to it.

Keep reading

Today you stop trying to copy the song and simply follow it. The first note goes down the page as a small black head with a stem, the second hooks its tail round the first, and by the third you have stopped holding the pen at all. The ink runs. You do not stop it. A line of staff rules trails off the edge of the vellum and keeps going across the table, over the stack of psalters, and out through the open shutter into the grey light over the sea.

Brother Aldo comes in with the lamp and stops. On your desk there is no page any more, or rather the page has become a bird, drawn in brown ink and lampblack, its breast a great looping ring where the sign for the high voice should be. Its wings are still loose staff lines, and the notes falling from them fade into the wash of the parchment until you can no longer tell where the ink ends and the morning begins.

Outside, something sings four notes. Aldo lifts his lamp higher, and you hear, faint and certain, that he has started to hum them.