Black musical notes tattoo on the neck just behind the ear, shown in a black and white photograph.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Musical notes behind the ear

Neck · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows three solid black musical notes, two beamed quavers and a single note with a flag, arranged in a loose diagonal on the skin behind an ear. The notes have smooth, bold edges with no visible shading, and the tattoo is the only colour-neutral focal point against the pale skin. The soft focus on the surrounding hair and the dangling earring frame the design in a close, intimate composition.

Neck Musical note Music

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The saloon piano on the Clementine had been out of tune since Tenerife, and by the Bay of Biscay the lurch of the hull had set its strings arguing with each other. I had a tuning hammer in my apron pocket and a chamois rag, and nobody aboard believed a steward could do the job until I had done it twice.

Keep reading

The fault was a single note, a low A that buzzed whenever the swell lifted the stern. I sat on the bench with the lid propped and listened for the beat between the wire and the fork. Outside the portholes the sea went grey, then black, and the chandelier swung in time with it, so that each time I struck a key the light shivered across the floor like something being poured.

Second Mate Adair found me at midnight, his oilskins steaming. He asked what a tune was worth at sea. I told him a tune was only one wire agreeing with another, and he laughed and said that sounded like most marriages. He hummed three bars of a shanty his mother had sung, stopped halfway, frowned, and went back up to the bridge.

By morning the A held. I played the shanty through once, badly, and the captain's wife came down in her dressing gown to ask for it again. I wrote the opening of it on the back of a ship's menu, two quavers joined at the tail and a lone note with its flag curling off the stem, and pinned it under the lid where the next steward would find it.