Black and grey realism tattoo of a treble clef with a cracked, raised effect, sitting on the forearm.

Cracked 3D treble clef on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large treble clef is shown in a three-dimensional style, with soft shading that makes the symbol appear raised from the skin. Fine cracks radiate outwards from the clef and across its surface, with dark shadowing beneath it. The tattoo is rendered entirely in black and grey against a plain, lightly lit background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The piano came over on the Tuesday boat, wrapped in tarpaulin and smelling of diesel. By Thursday the damp had found it. Ailsa Gray, who tunes everything on Skerrey with a fork she keeps in her apron pocket, lifted the lid and clicked her tongue at the soundboard, which had split from the bass end toward the middle like a frozen loch in March.

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The maker had inlaid a treble clef in pale wood above the keys, and the same fine cracks ran through it, out from the curl at the bottom and up the long stem. My grandmother had polished that clef every Sunday for fifty years. I told Ailsa it could wait. She said the wood was telling us something, and that a clef is only a promise to read the rest of the page.

We spent the week with hide glue warmed over a paraffin stove, clamps borrowed from the lifeboat shed, and a cup of tea going cold on the windowsill. Each night the wind came off the Atlantic and the house creaked, and each morning I found a new hairline in the clef that had not been there before, as if the cold were drawing its own music out of the wood.

On the last evening Ailsa pressed middle C and waited. The note came out thin, then steadied, and the clef above it went quiet. She closed the lid and handed me the fork. "Now you can hear where it's broken," she said, "and where it still holds."

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