Black and white photo of a fine line musical staff with notes and a treble clef tattooed along the side of a ribcage.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Musical staff tattoo on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph taken in a mirror, showing a camera held up in front of the subject and a white bra. A wavy musical staff with a treble clef and several notes is tattooed along the side of the ribcage. The linework is thin and even, and the image is greyscale with soft light and a blurred background.

Fine line Ribs Music Musical staff Musical note Treble clef

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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

Now sit down, the lot of you, because the lift at Hollins House is about to do what it always does between the ninth and tenth floors, which is hum. Hollins had nineteen floors and one piano, and the piano belonged to Mr Ferrier on the fourth, who had gone deaf in his left ear the winter the gas men came. He could still hear the top of a note, he said, so he tuned by feel and by the stairwell. Every night the wind climbed the concrete well and strung the washing lines across the landings like the lines of a score, and the notes sat on them, crotchets pegged to the rope and a treble clef made from a dropped glove.

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Young Danny Probert, who was nine and had no business on the roof, took to climbing up after school with a biro and a jotter. He copied every note the wind played. By March he had a whole page of them, and the page went wavy where he'd tried to write it along the stair rail. Mr Ferrier squinted at it with his good ear and said, that's not a tune, that's a wave. Danny said the wind had to go somewhere.

The night the power went off, the whole block was dark except the stairwell, and Danny stood at the top of it and whistled the page. The lift wire took up the sound and sang it back, the way a shell does, and on the fourth floor a door opened, then another, then a dozen. Mr Ferrier came up the stairs with his hand on the rail, humming the bass line under the boy's whistle, and he never once missed a step.