Black line drawing of a curving musical staff with a treble clef, several notes, two roses and floral swirls, shown as a tattoo design.

Musical staff with treble clef and roses

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A curving musical staff sweeps from the lower left to the upper right, carrying a treble clef, several quavers and crotchets, and a small rose at each end of the staff area. Dense floral swirls, scrolls and dot clusters fill the lower left corner. The image uses clean, even black linework on a plain white background with no shading or colour.

Botanical Music Musical staff Treble clef Musical note Rose Swirl Flourish Dot Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hurdy-gurdy organ on the Fenwick Brothers' dodgems had lost two of its pipes in Carlisle, so Nell ran the song on a tin whistle instead, leaning out of the ticket booth with the wind pulling at her plaits. Every evening at dusk the same boy came to the rail by the waltzers and waited for the tune to bend round the corner the way it always did. He never bought a ticket. He only counted the bars under his breath, tapping a finger against the painted side of the booth.

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On the last night of the August run, the generator coughed and the lights dropped out across the whole green. In the sudden dark Nell heard him say, quite clearly, "Play it from the top, the rose bit." She had not known he could speak, let alone that he had been listening so closely. She played it from the top. The ride's bulbs flickered back on in a slow stagger, and the painted roses along the ride's canopy seemed to swing in time.

He was gone by morning, the way travellers always are. Nell found a scrap of card tucked into the ticket tin: a staff drawn in pencil, curling up towards a clef, with two little roses at its ends and a rush of dots and leaves tumbling off the bottom edge like something that had grown out of the page. Beneath it, in careful capitals, he had written THE ROSE BIT IS THE HIGH ONE. She kept it folded in her whistle case, and when the fair wintered in Hull she taught herself to read the notes from it, one curve at a time.