Fine line tattoo of musical notes and a treble clef swirling across the skin behind a person's ear, in a sepia photograph.

Musical notes and treble clef behind the ear

Fine line · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A black fine line tattoo of musical notes and a treble clef curves across the skin behind the ear, with wavy lines trailing from the notes. The linework is delicate and unshaded, in black ink only. The sepia-toned photo shows the ear with silver piercings and hair swept to the side, with the face not visible.

Fine line Neck Musical note Treble clef Music Ear

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The blackbird had been singing the same four bars since Tuesday, and Mrs Okonedo at number nine swore it was in B flat, though she had never sat at a piano in her life. You knew better. From the potting shed, with a trowel across your knees, you copied its phrases onto the back of a seed packet with a stub of pencil, because the notes kept sliding off the lines the way the honeysuckle slid off the fence.

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By the end of June the packet was full. The quavers hung from their stems like late plums, and at the far left you had drawn a treble clef that looked more like a snail than a key. The boy from over the wall leaned on the coping to ask what it said. You told him it didn't say anything yet. It was only the garden finding its tune, and it would take the whole summer to get the rhythm right.

So you pushed the packet into the earth under the sweet peas and watered it every evening from the can that dribbled at the spout. Nothing came up but chickweed and one stubborn sorrel. In August, though, the sweet pea tendrils began to curl in long wavy lines, rising up the bamboo canes the way your pencil had risen up the paper, and the blackbird came down to perch on the top cane as if it had been asked.

Mrs Okonedo came out with her arms full of runner beans and stood very still. "That's B flat," she said. For once you did not argue. You let her have it, and the blackbird, already bored of the old key, began a new phrase somewhere above the washing line.