Colour tattoo of a cello and bass clef on the inner forearm near the wrist, shaded from purple through red to orange and blue.

Cello and bass clef on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A cello outline with a scroll, f-hole and bass clef, drawn in clean, slightly tapered linework. The ink fades from purple and red at the top to orange and blue at the bottom, giving a soft gradient effect. The instrument runs diagonally up the forearm against a plain pale skin background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cello had come ashore at Skerrow with its strings still tuned, wedged in a crate of lobster pots after the February gale. Nobody on the island claimed it. Morag Dunne carried it up the shingle on her back like a sleeping child and set it in the window of the old boathouse, where the damp swelled the spruce and the scroll gathered salt.

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She learned its voice slowly. The low C came out rough, like a gate on a bad hinge, but by March the bottom string had settled and she could play the first bars of the psalm her father used to hum over the nets. The gulls objected. The Harrow twins, who ran the shop, pretended not to hear from the road, though they left a loaf on the step each Thursday.

Her father's boat was late that spring. The fog came in off the Sound at four in the afternoon and sat on the water like wet wool. Morag took the cello down to the end of the pier at dusk, sat on an upturned creel and drew the bow across the bass string, long and low, the way you would call a dog home.

The fog thinned. A dark shape turned towards the light on the pier, and then an engine answered from the water, a little uneven, a little off-key. She kept playing until the hull knocked against the stones and her father's hand came up over the edge, orange in the last of the sun, and the cello sang its one clean note back across the harbour.

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