Black ink tattoo of musical notes and small stars across the top of a foot, with pink toenail polish, on a wooden deck.

Musical notes and stars across a foot

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A bare foot resting on weathered wooden decking shows a black tattoo of beamed and single musical notes, a wavy staff line, and scattered small stars and dots running from the top of the foot towards the toes and across the outer edge. The linework is solid black with simple filled note heads and no visible shading, and the ink reads as slightly soft at the edges, typical of a tattoo that has settled. The image is in natural colour with the skin tone and pink nail polish as the only other colours, framed close to the foot.

Fine line Other Musical note Star Staff Foot Music

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wind came off the Atlantic on the third night of the gale and took the music right out of Ada's hands. She had been copying the ferryman's tunes into the back of the parish ledger, pressing each quaver down with the blunt end of a pencil, and now the pages lifted past the lamp and went over the harbour wall like gulls with nothing left to say. She ran after them in her stockinged feet, the flagstones cold as pennies, until the sheets were gone into the dark.

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In the morning she found a few of them caught on the gorse above Skelder Cove. A beamed pair of quavers had snagged on the net drying shed, and a single crotchet hung from the lighthouse railing, its tail stiff with salt. The rest had not come down at all. When she looked up, the sky had cleared to a hard, pale blue, and above the bay the notes were still drifting in a loose line, tiny and black against the light, with stars scattered between them like someone had flicked a brush. Old Tomas from the lifeboat watched her from the slipway and said that when the sea takes a tune, you have to sing it back to get it home.

So she climbed to the headland with her ledger under one arm and sang the ferryman's first line, badly, her voice thin in the wind. The notes came down one at a time, settling on the wet grass, and where they landed they fizzed and reformed into a wavering staff across the heather. The stars followed, pricking the air between them as if the sky were checking the count.

By the next Sunday the whole melody was back on the chapel wall, copied in ink that had not yet dried, and Ada was humming it at the ferry queue. Only the last bar was missing, and nobody on Skelder ever found it. Ada said she had left it out on purpose, so the sea would have a reason to ask for another song.