Fine line black music notes tattooed on the outer ear, including a treble clef, a flat sign, a sharp sign and quavers.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Music notes along the ear

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A close-up of an ear with dark hair visible at the side of the frame. Small black musical symbols run from the upper rim towards the lobe, including a treble clef, a flat sign, a sharp sign and several quavers. The linework is thin and even, in solid black ink with no shading, set against light skin.

Fine line Other Music note Treble clef

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fiddle had hung on the nail above the bread oven since my uncle walked into the trees and did not come out, and nobody in Harrow Dene would touch it. I took it down on the first frosty morning because the church bellows had seized and the wedding was on Saturday. Mrs Oakley said the organ would have to make do with a kettle and prayer.

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I carried the instrument to the forest edge, where the beeches stop and the ploughed fields begin, and sat on the stile with my back to the village. The first note I played was flat, sagging like wet washing. I corrected it. A second note answered from inside the trees, clear and thin, and I knew it was no echo, because echoes arrive late and this one came exactly when I wanted it.

I wrote the tune on the back of a seed invoice, sign by sign: a treble clef like a hook for a lantern, a flat leaning left, a sharp with its hash of bars, and a row of quavers running down the page like rain off a roof. Each time I drew one, the wood answered in the same key, until the page was full and the trees had gone quiet.

On Saturday the bride walked up the aisle to a fiddle that sounded exactly like my uncle, and nobody asked where the sharp had come from. I still keep the invoice folded in my coat. Beneath the last quaver, in pencil, someone has written my name in a hand I do not recognise, and the tune is still going.