Small black fine line tattoo of a music staff with a treble clef and flowing notes on the shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Music staff and treble clef on a shoulder

Fine line · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A small tattoo shows a treble clef at the top left, with several staff lines curving downward and trailing off to the right. The linework is thin and even, in solid black ink with no shading. The tattoo sits on smooth skin with light freckling, and the surrounding areas are softly out of focus.

Fine line Shoulder Music staff Treble clef Musical note Music

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer, the wind's only listening at the door. You'll have heard the foghorn at Carrick Ness drop its note every ninth breath, and you'll have heard of the girl who kept it company. Ada Pennock could not read a page of music, but she could whistle back the horn's fall to the very semitone, and that was the trouble, because the horn was fixed and would not bend to her.

Keep reading

The winter the lamp's clockwork seized, her father set her to wind it by hand every four hours through the dark. She strung five lengths of tarred cord along the gallery rail, because she had seen how the rigging of the Mary Lowe hung from her mast. Each night she plucked the cords with a gull's flight feather and let the wind do the rest. The notes went out over the water, thinning as they fell toward the rocks like rain running off a sill.

In February, Tom Ferrier came in off the grey with his boat half swamped, and he swore he had steered by that strange tune. It had run down from the light like a stair, he said, and he had heard it in his sleep for a month. The notes leaned away from the reef, so he followed them home.

Her father never learned to read the music and never asked her to stop. The cord is long gone. But on still evenings the sea still falls off the point in that same shape, five pale lines dropping toward the rocks, and if you hum the ninth breath, you'll find the boats come in a little straighter.