Black and grey tattoo of shaded roses, leaves and musical notes on the side of the ribs, shown in a black and white photograph.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Roses and music staff on the side ribs

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo shows a large shaded rose with leaves on the right, and a paler rose at the upper left. A musical staff with notes curls diagonally between them across the skin. The shading is soft and realistic, with the composition running from the upper left toward the lower right of the torso, and a navel piercing is visible at the top right.

Realism Botanical Ribs Rose Leaves Musical note Music staff

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Aldous Pell had tuned pianos in Hull for thirty-one years and could tell a cracked soundboard from a damp one by the sound of a single key. The house on Harrowgate Lane had been shut since the spring. The solicitor's clerk had left the front door key under a chipped flowerpot, with a note asking him to be quick, as the buyers were impatient.

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The upright was flat in every register, but the middle A rang true, as if someone had been tapping it for years to keep her place. Inside the lid lay a sheet of manuscript paper, the staves drawn in pencil, the notes climbing and tumbling across the page like leaves blown off a wall. Pressed between the lines was a rose, dried flat and gone the colour of weak tea. Beneath the title, in a careful hand, someone had written: For R, who never could count her rests.

Pell remembered Rosalind Hale from the Criterion before the war, when she sang with a voice that made the bar staff stop polishing glasses. She had married a clerk from the docks and given up the stage, and he had given up going to the Thursday recitals. He sat down on the stool, pressed the A again, and hummed the tune wrong, the way he always had, while his fingers found the chords on the paper.

He tuned the piano to that single note and no other. When he closed the lid, the rose stayed where it lay, and he did not take it. On the step he set the key back under the flowerpot, as he had been asked, and walked home humming the part he had got wrong, which seemed the only honest way to carry it.