Black and grey tattoos of a musical staff with notes and a script banner on the inner forearm, with a second banner tattoo lower down the arm.

Sheet music banner tattoos on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two black and grey tattoos sit on the inner forearm near the wrist. The larger one shows a staff of music with notes and a curled ribbon banner carrying script lettering, and the second, lower on the arm, is another partly visible staff ribbon. The linework is bold and the shading is soft grey, and the photo is taken straight on against a plain pale background.

Forearm Musical staff Music note Sheet music Banner Script Ribbon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Margit,

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The organ loft at St Aldric's has been shut since the flood, so I have been copying parts for the church choir on the kitchen table above the chandler's shop, under a lamp that flickers whenever the trams go by. Mr Okonedo sent round the last of the Handel with a note saying the tenors will sing it flat regardless, so I have written the tenor line in pencil very large, the way you taught me, and underlined every rest twice.

You asked whether I still go down to the wharf in the evenings. I do, though not for the reason you think. The lock keeper's girl has been feeding the swans bread that is three days old, and the swans have started ignoring the ducks, which I find I want to tell someone about. She sings to them when she thinks nobody can hear. Badly, but with great seriousness, the way a child sings in church when she has been told the hymn is important.

I copied out her tune last week, from memory, on the back of a seed invoice. It went up in four bars, stalled on a high note, then came down a scale like someone going carefully down stairs in the dark. I have pasted it on the inside of the cupboard door. Tomorrow I will take it down to the barge and see if she can read a stave, and if she cannot I will teach her, one line at a time, because a melody that lives only in one head is a kind of weather that passes over and leaves nothing behind.

Yours in ink and in haste, Edie