Black ink music staff with notes, swirls and script lettering running down the side of the ribs, shown in a black and grey tattoo.

Music staff and notes along the side ribs

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink musical staff curves diagonally down the side of the torso, with musical notes, clef-like swirls and a few notes scattered at the lower end. Handwritten script lettering follows the staff, including the phrases speaking words of wisdom and let it be. The linework is clean and uniform in black ink with no colour, shown against warm, soft skin tones.

Ribs Music staff Musical note Swirl Script Lyric Music

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mags had the tiller under one arm and the kettle on the stove when the fiddle started up in the next lock. Nobody on the Thrift had owned a fiddle in forty years, so she knew it was Eli, back from the infirmary at Stockport with his wrists strapped and his bow hand as stubborn as ever.

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She moored up below the lock gates and found him sitting on the coping stone with the instrument across his knees, not playing, just tapping the bow against the wet stone to find the beat. He had a tune he kept meaning to finish, he said, and the trouble was the last bar. Every night it stopped short, like a narrowboat caught on a sill.

"Lyrics," he said, when she asked what the scratched marks in his notebook meant. "My mother painted them up the side of her boat, in cream on green. Speaking words of wisdom, let it be. She said if you can't say something sensible, sing it."

Mags took the pencil from him, sat down on the wet stone, and wrote the last bar in the margin, a long falling line the way the water drops at a lock. He played it through once. The gates groaned, the water roared out beneath them, and for the first time in a month the tune ended where it should.