Black and grey shaded tattoo of a musical staff ribbon with notes and a treble clef across the top of a foot near the ankle.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Musical staff ribbon across a foot

Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded ribbon of five-line musical staff curls diagonally across the top of a bare foot, carrying a treble clef and several musical notes. The linework is fine and the ribbon edges are softened with grey shading to give it a three-dimensional, rolled look. The image is a close, slightly angled photograph on a dark textured background, with the tattoo as the clear focus.

Ankle Musical staff Treble clef Musical note Ribbon Music Foot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ruth,

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The ribbon came off the tram at Grace Street this morning, rolled in brown paper and tied with a bootlace, and I knew before I opened it that it was Mr Halloran's. Nobody else in Scarrow writes staves that wide. He wants the score copied onto long strips of linen, five lines to the inch, so that it can be unrolled down the length of the chapel nave during the November service. I have been at the bench since four. The lamp is smoking and my fingers smell of ink, but the work is steady and I am glad of it.

The melody itself is strange. It climbs for a bar, then folds back on itself like a wave that has changed its mind, and the treble clef at the head of each line is drawn with a loop so generous it could hold an egg. I asked Mr Halloran who had composed it. He said his wife had hummed it in the kitchen every evening for thirty years and never once written it down, and that he had only now found the courage to take it from her head to the page. He would not let me touch the final line. He wants it left as it is, a bar of staves with no notes at all.

I think I understand that now. Last night I sat with the blank linen until the first grey light came through the net curtains, and I hummed the bars I had copied, quietly, as if I were the one who had to keep the tune alive. When the milk cart rattled past the window I stopped, and the room felt full of a silence that was waiting for something. I have left the last stave empty, Ruth. I will bring the strip to you on Sunday and you can tell me what you hear in it.

Yours, Tom