Colour tattoo of a treble clef made of musical staff lines, with a rainbow gradient and a bass clef inside, on a person's calf.

Rainbow treble clef on a calf

Calf · Colour · Photo

A treble clef is drawn with black linework, and its body curls into a spiral of five-line staves that carry small musical notes. A bass clef sits at the centre of the spiral, and the staff lines shift through a rainbow gradient from blue and purple at the top to red, orange, yellow and green lower down. The design is shown against pale skin on a lower leg, with a plain background and a person's jeans and shoe visible at the edge of the frame.

Calf Treble clef Bass clef Music note Staff lines Rainbow Spiral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift in Carrick House had been broken since the spring, so the children used the stairs and sang on them. Every landing had its own colour, painted by the tenants' association the year the council stopped sending men with brushes. Blue at the top where the Hendersons lived, then purple, red, orange, yellow, and green by the bins, so that climbing from the bottom meant going backwards through a rainbow.

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Old Dorrit Quaile kept a fiddle with no case and strings that did not match. She played it on the stairwell at dusk because the concrete made one note into three. On the sixth floor people closed their windows against it, and on the first floor they came out to listen. She taught the children to count the landings in notes, so the stairs became a tune that went round and round, and they could find their own front doors with their eyes shut.

One November she stopped coming down. The children climbed past her door every evening and heard only the radio behind it. Then, on the morning the lift was finally mended, a man from the council stood in the foyer with his clipboard, and the doors opened on an empty car with a fiddle lying on its floor, the bow tucked under the strings as if she had stepped out a moment before.

The children did not take the lift that day. They went up the stairs humming the notes they had counted, and at every landing a little more of the tune came back, until the whole block was singing its way up to the blue at the top.