Close photo of a black tattoo of five musical notes arranged in a star shape on pale skin, with a red and white patterned fabric draped nearby.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Music note star tattoo on skin

Other · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows five black musical notes with stems and flags, arranged so their stems form the points of a five-pointed star. The lines are solid and uniform, with the note heads filled in solid black and no visible shading. The warm, slightly vintage-toned photo is taken close up, with the star filling most of the frame and a red and white patterned fabric softly out of focus at the left.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The foghorn at Skerrin Point had five notes, and my grandfather taught me them before I could tie a bowline. Low, then high, then the long falling pair that meant the rocks were close. He wrote them on the back of a tide table so I would stop humming them wrong. Nobody in Skerrin ever needed the score. They only needed the sound.

Keep reading

Last Tuesday the horn cracked. Mr Fell from the harbour office came up the cliff path with a box of brass and a face like wet slate, and said the man from the lighthouse authority would not come until spring. So I sat in the keeper's room with the tide table and the stub of pencil, and I drew the five notes across the page with their stems pointing outward, the way Grandfather drew them. Then I joined the stems until they made a star. I could not say why. It seemed the only way to keep the shape of the thing.

The fog came in on Thursday, thick as wool. The Mary Quill was out past the bar with Tom Haddow aboard and his boy beside him. I had no horn, only a ship's bell and my own voice, which is no use in fog. So I climbed to the gallery and rang the bell in the pattern, low, high, high, low, falling, and I kept at it until my wrist went numb.

They came in at half four, the boat's lamp swinging like a drunk's. Tom shouted up that he had heard the rocks singing. I did not correct him. Next morning I went down to the harbour wall and found the boy scratching the five notes into the wet sand with a stick, stems splayed out like a star. Grandfather would have laughed. I did not stop him.

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