Brown ink drawing of a songbird in flight, its body formed from a treble clef and musical notes, with wings made of staves and notes drifting behind it.

Bird made of musical notes and a treble clef

Black and grey · Flash

A sketch of a small bird in flight, shown in profile facing left. Its body is built from a large treble clef and a trail of quavers and semiquavers, and its wings are drawn as curving musical staves with notes scattering off the tips. The soft brown shading and loose, sketchy linework sit on a plain pale background, with the subject filling most of the frame.

Bird Musical note Treble clef Wing Music

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody at the Ashcombe Grammar reunion remembered that Mr Pryce kept a treble clef chalked on the back of the storeroom door, but I did, because I was the one who swept up the chalk dust every Thursday. Twenty-two years on, the hall smelled of the same floor polish and warm squash, and someone had set a trestle table of name badges beside the fire door.

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Dougie Harker found me by the urn. He still hummed when he was nervous, the way he had in the back row of the choir, and he told me the council was selling the old music block for flats. "They're knocking through the storeroom," he said. "Found a box under the floorboards. Your name's on it." Inside was a bundle of exercise books, each page ruled into staves, and a pencilled sketch of a small bird built from notes, with a clef for its breast and a tail of quavers trailing off the page. Underneath, in Pryce's neat capitals, it said: FOR WHOEVER SINGS THE LAST BAR.

We had never sung the last bar. Pryce retired the year we left, and the Easter concert ended early, when the lights dropped and the curtain caught on its rail. I had always assumed it was an accident. Standing there with the notebook, I counted the notes on the bird's wing, sixteen of them, the same number of bars as the anthem we rehearsed until our voices cracked.

So I hummed the opening phrase to Dougie, and he came in thin and off-key on the fifth bar, and within a minute half the room had turned round. Nobody could remember the words we'd lost. We filled the gap with the tune alone, and when we reached the place where the bird should have lifted, I went over to the fire door and opened the window to let the cold in.