Rose over sheet music arm sleeve
Botanical · Chest · Black and grey · Photo
The collage shows a large rose set over a background of sheet music and musical notes, extending from the upper arm down the forearm. A moth on the upper chest and shoulder is shown in the top left panel, and the phrase THE PIANO and BIG MY SECRET appears as script at the top of the right panel. The shading is greyscale, with soft tonal gradation on the petals and fine linework on the notes and moth wings.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
The rose had been pressed inside the nocturne for eleven years, so when Ruth lifted the score towards the lamp, the petals came away as a brown stain on the paper, a ghost of the flower laid over the staves. She was copying the piece by hand for Mr Hollis at the Palace Ballroom, every crotchet and tie drawn in her small, square script, because the band had lost its only original and the bandleader would pay in cash if it sounded right by Saturday.
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Her brother Edwin had carried that book to sea and back, and the rose was the only thing he ever admitted to keeping from a girl in Scarborough. The upright in the back parlour had a cracked E flat that hummed when the damp came in. Ruth played the left hand softly on it at night while the kettle cooled, testing the bars she had drawn, and listened for the place where the melody bent like a man trying not to be heard.
On the last leaf, in pencil so faint she nearly missed it, someone had written BIG MY SECRET under a bar of rests, and beneath that, THE PIANO, as if it were a title or a dare. She sat with the pen over the ink pot for a long time. Then she copied the rests exactly, rules and all, and left the rose where it lay, because a copy should carry its faults as well as its beauty.
On Saturday the band went into the nocturne in E flat, and the floor thinned to the edges, couples standing still with their hands on each other's sleeves. Ruth watched from the stage steps with the original folded in her lap. When the middle section arrived, the silence where the rests fell was so full that she heard the cracked key sound once, faintly, as if someone had sat down at the piano to join them.
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