Two black tattoos of a treble clef and a bass clef sit on a pair of ankles resting on a blue blanket, with a small star charm on one ankle.

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Treble and bass clef ankle tattoos

Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

Two bare feet rest on a dark blue blanket, showing a black treble clef tattoo on the outer ankle of the left foot and a black bass clef tattoo on the outer ankle of the right foot. The clefs are drawn in simple, solid black ink with smooth outlines and no shading. A thin cord with a small gold star charm wraps the left ankle beside the tattoo.

Ankle Treble clef Bass clef Music Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now then, hush, the fire won't tell itself. Where was I? Ah, the road to Calder Flats, forty miles of dead straight tarmac going nowhere pleasant. Mae Corrigan walked it in February with a double bass strapped to her back like a sleeping child, humming the bottom half of a hymn her mother used to sing. Nobody had taught her the top half. She reckoned it was somewhere up the road, waiting.

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Up the road, beside the cracked well at Sallow, sat a boy called Tobias Vane who could sing so high the dust fell off the windowsills. He'd been humming the top half for three summers. Neither knew the other existed, which is the way of most good songs. The old men say a stave is five lines of nothing until a clef tells you where to stand. Treble up high, bass down low, and the notes between only make sense when both are there.

They met under the water tower, and the first thing she did was tie a little brass star to his wrist with a length of cord, so he'd have something to steer by when the sand rose at night. He tied the same cord round her ankle, since she was the one forever wandering off. For eleven nights they followed that star across the flats, and on the twelfth the church came up out of the heat with its bell hanging silent and no rope left in it.

So they sang. The hymn rose and fell, high then low, and somewhere in the second verse the bell gave one note, cracked and clear, as if it had been holding its breath. Mae scratched two clefs into the church door with a nail, one above the other, and went to sleep under the star. The door's gone now. But I've heard the tune, and if you hum it slow enough, you'll find where to stand.