Black fine line tattoo of a treble clef, musical staff and floating notes curling across a forearm.

Musical staff and notes on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black linework tattoo of a treble clef, five-line staff and several musical notes sweeps diagonally across the skin. The lines are fine and even, with the staff filled in with a light grey wash for depth. The design sits against a plain, pale background with a grey floor visible at the bottom of the frame.

Fine line Forearm Music Musical staff Treble clef Musical note Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Marguerite, the chapel organ at Hollin Court has finally given up its ghost, and I am writing to you from the floor of its loft with a torch between my teeth and a bag of rusted springs at my knee. Mr Pask says the instrument was built by a Dutchman in 1788 and has not been properly tuned since the old earl's funeral, which I gather was a rowdy affair involving the hunt and a bishop who could not hold his claret. The staff lines have been painted onto the loft boards in faded ink, five of them, curling like a wave that someone forgot to finish. Above them a treble clef has been scratched so deep into the plaster that I could fit my little finger in its loop.

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Yesterday I found a leaf of paper folded behind the bellows, a melody written out in a hand so cramped I could barely read the notes. Beneath it, in a different hand, someone had written only: play it when the rain stops. The rain has not stopped in three weeks. So I have been picking at the pipes with the edge of a tuning fork, humming the thing under my breath, and every time I reach the sixth bar the bellows wheeze out a sound like a sigh.

This morning Mr Pask climbed up, listened for a minute, and said that the tune was not for the organ at all but for the handbells in the village church, which were melted down for shot during the war. I thought he was teasing me until the sun came through the east window and laid a row of pale notes across the floorboards, one for each bell that is no longer there. I am going to try it on the reed pipes tomorrow. Do not tell Father I have stopped sleeping in the loft. Yours, Edie.