Black and grey tattoo of the Space Needle with its roots spreading below and music notes on a staff wrapping around it, across the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Space Needle with music notes on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows the Space Needle tower with a sweeping musical staff and notes curling around its shaft, and roots spreading out at the base. The linework is fine and the shading is soft and smooth, giving the tower and roots a three-dimensional look. The piece is in black and grey, and the composition is centred on the upper back with the staff extending outward on both sides.

Back Music note Musical staff Treble clef Root Tower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cables started humming on the third day of the wind, and by the fourth Walter Hale had stopped pretending it was the generators. He sat on the scaffold with his tuning fork pressed to a steel guy wire, eyes shut, as though the city's newest tower were a sick horse. 'Flat,' he said. 'Somebody's been singing down there.'

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Nell Ostrander, nineteen and hired to carry his case, looked down past the girders to the rooftops of Queen Anne. Nobody sang on the site. The men were quiet and whistled only at lunch, badly. But the sound came up through the frame and into the soles of her boots, a line of notes that rose and bent and fell back, the way a melody does when it is being remembered rather than played.

The men in the fairground office said the tower had been drawn as a stalk, not a spire. Walter said that was nonsense, and then he said the roots were the part that bothered him, because the footings spread under the lot as if the ground had been asked to hold a tune. On the last morning he gave Nell the fork and told her to strike it against the stone at the base and listen. The note went down. It did not come back up. Where it went, she could not say.

Years later she heard that the notes had been strung into the cables by a surveyor's error, a stave of wire in the wrong gauge, and she believed that no more than she believed in roots. What she kept was Walter's last instruction: when a thing sounds flat, don't tune the thing, tune the ground it stands in. She still hears the tower when the wind comes off the water from the west.