Black line drawing of musical notation on a white background, showing beamed eighth notes, treble clefs, a bass clef, rests and an f dynamic marking, with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Musical notation design on white

Black and grey · Flash

The image shows a black drawing of musical notation on a plain white background. It includes beamed eighth notes, several treble clefs, a bass clef, rests and a small italic f dynamic marking, arranged in three loose groups across the frame. The solid black linework has no shading or colour, and the design is spread across the page with generous white space.

Musical note Treble clef Bass clef Music

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Halloran would not let me touch the ink until I could draw a treble clef without lifting the pen, and it took me the whole of my first winter in the copying room at Hebden Bridge to manage it. By spring I was writing out parts for the silver band at a shilling a page, perched at the back window where the light came in grey off the canal and the lock gates groaned all afternoon.

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The rests were the hard part. Anyone can hang a note on a stave, but a rest has to be exactly as long as the silence the players will sit through, or the cornets come in early and the conductor's face goes the colour of brick. I learnt to count bars under my breath, pen hovering, while the kettle went cold on the gas ring behind me.

On the Tuesday before the Whit Friday contest, a cornet part came in with a small italic f set above a long bar of rest. Halloran's note beside it said only: after forty bars of nothing, a single forte must sound like a door slammed in a chapel. I wrote it out three times, blotting each one, and when I finally got the spacing right I kept the spoilt copies in my coat, because the ink had bled into the paper and I liked the look of it.

At the contest the band sat under the marquee with the wind pushing at the canvas. Halloran lifted his baton, the silence stretched until somebody coughed, and then the cornet came in on my f, loud and sudden, and the sound struck the back wall of the tent and came straight back at us. The spoilt copies are still in a biscuit tin under my bed. Nobody else ever looks at them.