Black line design of the word MUSIC where the letters are replaced by musical symbols, including a clef, beamed notes and a rest, on a white background.

MUSIC lettering made from musical symbols

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The design spells the word MUSIC using musical notation in place of some letters. The M is a script-style form, followed by beamed eighth notes, a clef-like mark with dots, a rest symbol and a final serif C. The artwork is solid black on white with no shading, and it is composed as a single horizontal line of lettering.

Lettering Music Musical note Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The piano went out of the saloon on a Tuesday, which my father would have called the wrong day, since he always tuned on Tuesdays and said a piano should only be moved when it was already in tune. We lifted it with two straps and a borrowed sack truck, the legs scraping the brass rail, while the canal slapped the hull of the Juniper as if it had an opinion too.

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Dad had kept the boat thirty-one years on the Grand Union, tuning pianos in back rooms from Brentford to Hemel Hempstead. The paint on the cabin doors still carried his notes: beamed quavers over the galley hatch, a bass clef on the coal box. The man from the Crown at Cowley offered four hundred pounds for the upright, and the mooring was eight weeks behind, so I said yes before he could talk about condition. Then I sat on the stool, lifted the lid and played the one bar he used to hum while he worked.

Under the hammers, tucked where the felt had gone soft, I found a folded sheet of manuscript paper. He had written MUSIC across the staves in his squared, careful hand, swapping notes in for letters the way he did on birthday cards. Beneath it, in pencil, he had written: 'For Nell, when you need the rest of it.' The rest sign sat exactly where the C should have been, and I understood he had meant the pause, not the end.

I did not sell it in the end. The Crown man went home with his disappointment and I paid the marina from the biscuit tin. Most mornings I play that one bar at the lock gates, then leave the space after it, the way he taught me, and wait for the boat to move.