Close-up of a small black fine line music note tattoo behind a person's ear, with a black stud earring below it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small music note behind the ear

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A close-up photograph of the back of a person's ear showing a small, simple music note drawn in dark ink on the skin behind it. The linework is thin and solid, with no shading, and the ink is black. The background is softly blurred in warm, muted tones, with the hair pulled back and a black stud earring placed lower on the lobe.

Fine line Other Music note

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift in Carrick House had been broken since March, so I took the stairs to the fourteenth floor with a bag of shopping cutting into my fingers. Halfway up, on the landing with the wonky window, somebody was playing the same three notes on a keyboard, over and over, the way a kettle keeps coming back to the boil. I stopped to listen. It was the sort of sound you only hear in a stairwell, bouncing off concrete.

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Mrs Adeyemi on eleven said it was young Jonah from the flat with the blue door, learning something for his grandad's birthday. Nobody knew the tune. I started copying the notes onto the back of a takeaway menu while I waited for the bus, the little dots and tails falling in a line like swallows on a wire. Ten days later I had the whole thing, forty bars of it, and still no idea what it was called.

On the fourteenth floor I pressed my ear against the vent in the bathroom wall and hummed the bit I'd got wrong. The keyboard stopped mid-phrase. Then, through the plaster, came the correction: one note lifted a step, precise as a pin. I laughed out loud in my empty flat.

The next morning there was a sheet of paper taped to the lift doors, which still didn't work. Across the top someone had written in biro: For Grandad, who whistled it. Under that was a single musical note, small and dark, pointing up towards the stairs.