Small black tattoos of a treble clef, two musical notes and a bass clef across the fingers of a hand, shown in a close photo of the back of the hand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Music symbols tattooed on four fingers

Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Four small musical symbols sit one per finger: a treble clef on the index finger, a beamed note on the middle finger, a bass clef on the ring finger and a single note on the little finger. The linework is simple and solid in black ink, with the bass clef showing slightly softer edges. The hand is photographed against a dark blue background, with the fingers angled towards the camera.

Hand Treble clef Bass clef Music note Musical note Music Finger

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down by the stove and mind the kettle, because this is the one about Nell Corrigan and the four notes she carried on her hand. She was the lock-keeper's girl at Saltwick Cut, and she could not read a page of music to save her life, though her father swore she could hear a sluice gate sing a flat B.

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Her uncle Tobias played the bass in the pub at the head of the cut, a man with a rattling cough and a fiddle case that always smelt of wet rope. He drew a treble clef on her index finger with a soot-blackened pen cap, telling her a clef was a key to a door she had not found yet. The beamed note went on the middle finger, for the boat-hands who sang when they hauled, and the bass clef sat on the ring finger because Tobias said every good tune needs something low to stand on.

The winter the ice came down the river, Tobias went through the rotten pier trying to pull a drowned dog out by its collar. Nell inked the last clef herself, on the ring finger, with a needle and a sailor's pot of ink, and her hands shook the whole time. The single quaver on her little finger she kept for herself, a note with nowhere to go, like a girl with nowhere to go.

Every spring after, when the first barges came up through the lock, she laid her hand flat on the timber gate and played the four of them against the wood. The gate hummed back in a key nobody in the village had a name for. That is how you know the cut still remembers him. Now pass me the rum and hush.