Black and grey script tattoo reading music is what feelings sound like, framed by swirling flourishes, on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Script quote with swirls on upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a black ink tattoo across the upper back, set over the shoulder blade. The script lettering reads music is what feelings sound like and is wrapped in curling flourishes, dots and scrollwork that sweep out towards the lower left. The image is in black and white, so the bold outlines and fine ornament stand out clearly against the skin.

Lettering Back Script Quote Lettering Flourish Scrollwork Swirl Dot

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit still, the pair of you, and don't go running to your mother afterwards saying I got it wrong, because she heard this from me first and she still tells it differently. Pellow Bridge, the spring of fifty-three. Edwin Marl came home from the war and went quiet in the way a clock does when someone forgets to wind it. He kept his tuning fork in his waistcoat pocket and his bag of felts on the back step, and he tuned every piano in the valley except the one that mattered.

Keep reading

That was Tilda Brand's upright, cracked down the back by the frost. She sent for him on a Tuesday. He sat on her good stool with his ear pressed to the wood, and he said the bass notes sounded like a cellar full of wet coats. She asked him what grief sounded like, plain as that, because she had buried her sister the week before and nobody else would say the word. Edwin said it rang on under the floorboards long after you'd struck the key, like a fork you couldn't stop.

Tilda laughed, and it was the first laugh anyone had heard from her since Lent. Then music is what feelings sound like, Mr Marl, she said, and you've been playing yours flat for years. He tuned that piano in an afternoon. The following Sunday he played it in the chapel hall, a slow curl of notes going up and down like the swallows over the weir, and the children stopped their scuffling to listen. If you ever hear a tune drifting off the bridge at dusk, that's him, still tuning the river.