Black lettering tattoo spelling the word music with musical notation symbols, including a treble clef and quavers, across the upper back.

Music lettering made from notation on upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo spells the word music using musical symbols: the letters are formed from a treble clef, quavers, and other notation, framed by repeat signs at each end. A horizontal line runs beneath with pp and ff dynamic markings at either side, suggesting a crescendo. The design is in solid black ink with clean, bold linework, shown against pale skin on the upper back.

Lettering Back Music Musical notation Treble clef

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the bannister, it still has the hole where Mr Okafor's cat went through. Right. Sit. You'll want to hear this one through the wall, because that's how I first heard it, in 1974, lying on the lino of Flat 14, Hallam Tower, while the Pryce boy practised his grandmother's piano on the other side of the plaster.

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He could only play it soft at first. Pianissimo, Mrs Pryce called it, shouting up the stairwell with her hands on her hips, pp, pp, the way it says on the sheet music. So for a whole winter we heard him feeling his way through the same four bars of a hymn, so quiet you had to hold your breath to catch the notes, like someone sliding a letter under a door.

Then came the spring the council fixed the lifts and the whole block woke up at once, and the boy found the nerve to lean on the keys. A bit louder every week. You could feel it in the bricks. By June the lino hummed under my back and the light shades swung in their sockets, and Mrs Pryce stopped shouting about pp altogether. She just stood at the bottom of the stairs with her mouth open, ff, ff, as if the word had got loose and wouldn't go back in her mouth.

The boy went off to conservatoire in Leeds, the piano went to the tip, and Hallam Tower came down in a cloud of dust the year after. But I still think about that climb from one end of the page to the other. Now the kettle starts ticking and I catch myself humming the bass line under my breath, very softly, the way he used to start.