Two-panel collage showing a wavy musical staff with notes wrapped around a forearm, and bass and treble clef tattoos on the backs of two hands, each with watercolour-style splashes.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Musical staff and clef tattoos on forearm and hands

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The left panel shows a forearm with a wavy musical staff and notes in fine black linework, surrounded by red, orange and teal watercolour splashes. The right panel shows two hands held together, with a red and pink bass clef on one hand and a black treble clef with teal splashes on the other. The colour ink is applied in loose washes around solid black linework, and the two panels are arranged side by side.

Forearm Hand Music note Musical staff Treble clef Bass clef

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By three in the morning the ward had gone soft at the edges, the way it does, and the only sound was the syringe driver on bed four ticking like a clock nobody had wound. Mr Tallis had been awake since midnight. He wanted the day-room piano, the one with the dead G, and he wanted it now, so I wheeled him there in his chair with his drip stand clanking behind us like a reluctant bridesmaid.

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He had a paper folded in four, soft as cloth, taken from the pocket of his pyjama top. On it five lines had been drawn freehand, and across them a wavy ribbon of notes that ran off the bottom edge in pencil. Someone else had written a bass clef in the margin in a looser, angrier hand. 'Eli's,' he said. 'Bed opposite, Co-op hall, Bethnal Green, 1979. We were going to play the Saturday dances and then we weren't.' He pressed the dead G with his thumb until it gave a flat, tired note, then showed me where the bass was meant to come in beneath the treble.

I played the top line with one finger, badly, and he sang the bottom in a voice like a rusted gate. We reached the turn before a healthcare assistant came to say the ward was short of hands. On the way back I pushed him past bay five, where a curtain was drawn across Eli's bed. Mr Tallis asked me to leave the paper on the locker beside it. By the time the day shift came on the curtain was open, the locker was bare, and the bed had been made tight as a drum. Only the pencil ribbon was left in my head, still running off the edge of the page.