Black ink drawing of a treble clef with a horizontal line crossing through it, sketched on white paper.

Hand-drawn treble clef in black ink

Black and grey · Flash

A treble clef is drawn in black ink on plain white paper, with a single horizontal line crossing through its upper section. The strokes vary in thickness, with a thick curl at the base and a tapering top. The design is in solid black with no shading, and the paper fills most of the frame.

Treble clef Music Musical notation

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wind stopped whistling through the arrow slits of Caster Hollin the autumn the miller's girl stopped speaking, and nobody in the valley could say why the two things seemed to belong together. Her name was Yso. Each evening she climbed the hill with a pot of iron-gall ink and a goose quill, because her grandmother had told her the castle was built around a tune, and a tune is only kept by being written down.

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In the great hall, the old minstrels' gallery still carried a row of worn grooves across the stone, five lines running wall to wall like ruled paper. Yso drew the curled key at the head of them, the sign that tells a voice where to sit, and let its tail fall down the stone to the heavy bell of a note at its foot. Each evening the ink dried a shade paler than the night before, and each morning the wind came back a little thinner.

On the ninth night the miller followed her up with a lantern, certain she had fallen from the wall. He found her on the broken steps with the drawing finished and her hand black to the wrist. He asked what she thought she was doing. She said she was giving the wind a shape it could remember. He looked at the low loop of the key for a long while, then began to hum the note at its base, badly and then less badly.

From the arrow slits came one long breath that rose and bent and settled into the tune. Yso started speaking again the next morning, though for a week she only said the name of the note. By spring the children of the valley could hum that bottom note without knowing where it came from, and the miller's thumb stayed grey at the knuckle, which his wife said was proof enough that the wind had been kept.