Pencil sketch of a tattoo design with a treble and bass clef forming a heart, music notes and the script words When it hits you feel no pain, drawn on paper with no body part shown.

Clef heart with music notes and script quote

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing on pale paper shows a treble clef and a bass clef intertwined to form a heart shape, with a stem running through the centre. Small music notes and dots surround the heart, and the words When it hits you feel no pain appear in cursive script above and below it. The shading is soft grey pencil with simple outlines and no colour, and the composition is centred and symmetrical.

Lettering Treble clef Bass clef Heart Music note Script Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wheel gave out a mile below the Gallow Gate, so we carried the cello and the two fiddles up the last stretch ourselves, Teodor swearing in the dialect of his valley every time the wind shoved us sideways. Snow filled the ruts behind us faster than we could leave them. By the time we reached the summit hut, my ears had stopped reporting anything at all.

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The keeper, Brannoch, had one stove going and a sack of peat he would not spend on strangers until Teodor opened the cello case and tuned the low C with his thumb. Drovers were stranded on the far side of the pass with four hundred sheep and nothing to do but shiver. Brannoch wanted something to keep them moving. Teodor tapped his breastbone and said, "Low notes go through the ribs before the ear has heard them. When it hits, you feel no pain." His grandmother used to say it about whisky. He meant it as a joke, but he played as if he believed it.

I took the treble line above him. The bow bit, the strings sang, and the two parts knotted together the way they do when two people have played for thirty years and no longer need to look at each other. The drovers came up the stairs one at a time, stamping snow from their boots, and sat on the flagstones with their hats in their laps. A girl of about eight pressed her cheek against the cello's belly and asked why the notes seemed to curl. I told her the wind was getting tangled in the wood.

The storm dropped before dawn. We left at first light with the peat paid for and the sheep already strung out on the descent. Teodor's left hand had split across two fingertips, and he bound them in a strip torn from my spare shirt without a word. At the bottom of the pass he flexed the bloodied fingers, found they still worked, and began humming the bass line under his breath as he lifted the cello into the cart.