Two black tattoos of musical staves with notes and a treble clef sit either side of the navel on a bare midriff, above a low waistband.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Music staves and notes on the lower abdomen

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A bare midriff shows two matching black tattoos of musical staves with notes, one with a treble clef on the left and the other curving on the right. The staff lines flow like ribbons, with solid and beamed notes drawn in fine, even linework. The image is in black ink only and is framed from the chest down to the waistband, with a dog tag and a belt buckle visible.

Other Music note Treble clef Staff lines Music

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Late August in the Harrowby orchards, and the Pearmain trees had gone quiet. Old Tilda Sorrel said it was because nobody had sung to them since her father died, and the pickers laughed, but they stopped laughing when the crop came in green and small. So when the fiddler came up the lane with a case tied shut with string, Tilda walked out to meet him with a jug of cider and no questions.

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He said his name was Wren and asked for a bed in the loft and a row of trees to play to. Each evening he sat at the end of the row with the case open on his knees and drew his bow across the strings, and the notes went out over the grass like ribbons unwinding from a spool. Tilda watched from the gate. The notes climbed the trunks, and where they rested the leaves turned the colour of old pennies, and the apples swelled on the branches like small bells.

By the second week the boys from the cottages had come to listen, and one of them, a lanky lad called Ned Carrow, tried to copy the tune on a tin whistle and got it wrong. Wren did not laugh. He took a stub of pencil from his waistcoat, wrote the notes on the back of a seed packet, and showed Ned how the black heads hung from their beams like plums on a stalk. "Every tune is only a sum of falls and rises," he said. "Count the ones that go down."

At the harvest supper Wren packed the fiddle, left the cider jug full, and walked off east before the lamps were lit. The orchard kept yielding for years after, and Ned, grown and grey, still counted the falls and rises whenever he climbed a ladder to pick. The trees never did learn the tune. They only learned to keep time.