Black rose tattoo on one forearm beside a treble clef on the other, with red watercolour splashes and sketchy linework.

Black rose and treble clef on forearms

Botanical · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

Two inner forearms show a paired design: a shaded black rose with grey tones on the left arm, and a black-lined treble clef on the right. Loose, sketchy linework runs through both motifs, with splashes of red wash behind the clef and around the rose. The two designs sit side by side across the arms, so the composition reads as one piece split between them.

Botanical Forearm Rose Treble clef Music Flower Splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had found its way under the awning again, so every box of sheet music on the stall smelled of wet cardboard and old pennies. I was counting change for a man who wanted a Chopin nocturne he would never play when Maud came down the aisle with her collar up and a carrier bag clutched to her chest.

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She didn't want music. She wanted me to draw something. She unrolled a single page torn from a hymnal, its margins gone soft as cloth, and asked whether I could ink a treble clef over the staves without the lines showing through. I told her a clef is only a curl with a long tail, and she said that was exactly what her brother had told her, and that he had been wrong about most things except the tail.

Her brother had drawn a rose on his arm the summer before he left for the ferries, she said, and she had drawn the clef on hers so the two would sit side by side like a duet. The rose had gone black with age. The clef had kept its red. I did not ask which of them was still out in the rain.

I inked it that afternoon at the back of the stall with a borrowed fountain pen while the shutters came down one by one. When she came back for it the ink had bled a little at the tail, a thin dark line running off the page toward the edge, and she laughed and said that was how he always wrote, trailing off before the bar was finished. She paid me in coins still warm from her pocket. I kept the page folded inside the Chopin, where the rain could not reach it.