Fine black line tattoo of a musical staff with a treble clef and notes on the inner forearm near the wrist.

Musical staff with treble clef on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink tattoo of a five-line musical staff with a treble clef at the left and several notes spread across the lines, including a beamed pair near the right. The linework is thin and even, with small shaded note heads, and the design is shown in greys and black against pale skin. The photograph is a close, slightly angled shot of the inner forearm with dark denim visible at the left edge.

Fine line Forearm Musical staff Treble clef Musical note Music Staff lines

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gulls above Skerrow harbour sang five notes every evening before the wind turned, and the old people said that whoever wrote them down would never lose a boat. Nobody managed it. Annick Pell tried each spring with chalk on the quay wall, ruling five lines and hanging little black heads from them, but the spray took the chalk on every high tide and the gulls only laughed at her.

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Tam Corrie, whose father mended nets on the slip, took a stub of pencil and the back of an old tide table out into the wind one evening. He drew the staff with his ruler, then the curl his grandmother had always swept in the air like a ram's horn. Four quick notes went down the lines. The fifth, the pair the gulls held longest, he joined with a beam, and his hand shook because the paper was blowing and the light was going.

That night the sky turned green over the bar and eleven boats were still out past the Scarp. Tam ran to the end of the breakwater with the tide table flapping in his fist. He could not read his own marks in the dusk, so he sang them, hoarse and cracked, the four quick notes and then the long pair, and out on the water a horn answered, then another, then the lantern of the Mary Jane swung round towards the lights.

They came in one by one on the sound of his voice. Annick Pell found him soaked on the quay at midnight, still humming, and she did not ask him for the paper. The chalk was gone by morning, but the gulls kept to the same five notes, and the boats kept coming home to them.