Black fine-line style tattoo of a treble clef, musical notes, staff lines and script words across a person's ribs and side.

Musical notes and treble clef on ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A large black tattoo runs down the side of the torso, dominated by a treble clef with staff lines and musical notes swirling around it. Script lettering in black ink is woven through the design, and the ink appears to be a single solid black with no shading or colour. The subject is framed from the side and slightly behind, with the design filling most of the left side of the frame against a plain wall with posters.

Lettering Ribs Treble clef Musical note Staff lines Music Script Love

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Pargeter had kept the upright piano in the front parlour of Seaview House for thirty-one years, and in all that time nobody had asked anyone to tune it. Tom Ashby arrived on the Tuesday train with his leather roll of tuning hammers and a tin of mutes, and found the room smelling of damp wool and Brasso. The B flat above middle C had sunk as flat as a dropped plate, and two of the pins had rusted into the frame.

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Through the bay window the tide was coming in over the groynes. Guests drifted past in cardigans, and every few minutes one of them stopped to press a key and wince. A widow from room four asked him whether it could be made to sound the way it used to. He told her pianos rarely did, but he could make it sound like itself.

On the third evening the house held a concert, because Mrs Pargeter insisted, and a retired schoolmaster played a hymn so badly that the lamp chains seemed to shiver. Afterwards Tom took the bench, struck the restored B flat, and let the note hang until the last of the chatter died. Then he played the music-hall tune his father used to hum over the wash-tub, slow at first and then faster, and the guests began clapping along without knowing why.

When he closed the lid, Mrs Pargeter pressed two pennies into his palm and said the piano had not sounded so cheerful since her husband went to sea. Tom said nothing. Outside, the tide turned, and somewhere up the stairs a child called down, 'Play on,' so he did, until the cold crept into the keys and the sea went quiet beneath the window.