Black and white flash design of treble and bass clefs arranged in a radial pattern with swirling curves and dots, shown without any body placement.

Radial design of clefs and dots

Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical design of five swirling curves radiating from a central point, with treble and bass clef symbols placed along the arms. Small solid dots sit around the outer edge of the composition. The design is rendered in solid black ink on a white background with bold curves and fine clef details.

Music Treble clef Bass clef Swirl Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fair came over the hill at Harrowby every September with five painted wagons and a steam organ that nobody had tuned since the old king. Its keeper was a woman called Mab Quill, who walked ahead of the horses with a pocketful of dried peas and a ledger of debts. The children followed her for the peas. The grown-ups followed the organ, which played by itself whenever the wind came from the north.

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One year a boy named Tobias Fenn climbed onto the centre wagon to work the bellows lever and found a drawer of brass pipes, each stamped with a little curl like a key to a door nobody had drawn yet. He carried them down to the field inside his coat. Mab took one look and told him the organ had five arms and wanted five dots of silver paid around its rim, one for each song it had forgotten.

He went looking for the silver. He sold his father's pocket watch to a rag dealer in Dunmere and bought a bag of small round weights from the bell-founder's widow, and they rattled like rain in his hand. He laid them in a ring around the outside of the fairground, and each evening the wagons turned a little on their axles, slow as hands on a clock, until the great clef on the middle wagon began to hum.

On the last night the organ played every song it owned, and the lamps leaned in toward the centre like moths. Mab sat on the step with her ledger open and wrote one line: paid in full, with the boy's name in the margin. In the morning the field was empty except for five black curls pressed into the grass, and one loose dot that rolled off toward the river and was never found.