Black and grey tattoo of torn sheet music with musical notes and a time signature wrapping around the upper arm.

Torn sheet music on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows four rows of musical staves with notes, rests and a time signature at the start of the first row, drawn to look like torn paper with ragged edges. The linework is bold and the shading on the paper edges and under the notes gives it depth. The design is entirely black and grey and wraps around the upper arm, with the subject's face and head not shown.

Realism Upper arm Sheet music Musical note

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find the sheet music tucked under the piano stool at the Co-operative Hall on a wet Thursday, folded twice and already furred at the edges with damp. Four staves, a 4/4 at the start of the top line, and in pencil across the margin someone has written "Mr Pearce, for the Whit dance." Mr Pearce has been dead since March, and nobody in Hebden Lowe has played a waltz since.

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The Whit dance is a fortnight off and the committee wants something with a bit of bounce in it. You tell them you'll see what the old tune looks like with fresh ink. Vera Croft, who runs the tea urn, says her husband used to hum it while he shaved, and that is as close to a score as anyone can offer. So you sit at the upright with the sheet propped against the music stand, your thumb under the top row, and you start to read the notes the way Mr Pearce must have meant them, the crotchets stacked in threes, the little hook of a quaver falling onto the second beat.

Then Tom Haigh, the joiner's boy, leans across to look and his elbow catches the page. It rips clean along the second stave, a ragged strip of bars dropping onto the floorboards. He goes red to the ears. You pick the strip up, blow the dust off it, and tuck it inside your coat, because the rest of the tune is still there in your hands. You play the gaps by ear that night, and the hall gets up and dances to something no one has heard before, a little lopsided and entirely theirs.