Black ink tattoo of a treble clef, music notes on a five-line staff and a curling floral swirl on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Musical staff and swirl on upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a treble clef and several music notes on a five-line staff, with the notes ending in a flourish of scrolling, leaf-like linework. The lines are solid and even, and the ink is applied in solid black with no shading. It sits on the upper arm against a plain skin tone, with a window and blinds in the background.

Upper arm Music Musical staff Treble clef Music note Swirl Floral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Eddie Sowerby kept the march folded in his breast pocket, so often that the staff lines had gone soft as flannel. Every Saturday he laid it open on the Club piano and weighed its corners down with two ashtrays, because the back door let in a draught that would lift it off the keys.

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The winter the Hartley seam flooded, the band lost half its men to the lamp room and the rest to the bookies. We rehearsed in the Club cellar with the drip going in the corner bucket. Eddie kept saying the march was wrong, that the last few bars never resolved, and he would tap the page with his fingernail where the notes ran off the top line and kept on going.

One night he said the crotchets were growing. We all leaned in, and I swear the notes had drawn a little tail of ferns behind them, bracken like the stuff off the spoil heap, curling up into the margin as if reaching for the window. Nobody laughed. Old Bill Carr set his cornet down and said his own father had heard that same tune in a flood year, and it was the last thing played before the pit gates shut.

We played it at the gala anyway, nineteen of us then sixteen then fourteen, on the field with the rain holding off. Eddie dropped his baton on the last bar, then picked it up and kept time with his fist. When we finished, the stalks were still uncoiling off the page, pale green in the sunlight, and the treble clef stood up at the front of the staff like a gate someone had forgotten to lock.