Black line drawing of a treble clef and bass clef forming a heart shape, decorated with ornate swirling blackwork patterns on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Treble and bass clef heart design

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

The design shows a treble clef and a bass clef interlocking to form the outline of a heart. Both clefs are drawn with thick black outlines and filled with decorative swirls, curls and small circular motifs in white. The image is a flat, high-contrast drawing on a plain white background with no shading or colour.

Blackwork Treble clef Bass clef Heart Music Swirl Filigree Musical notation

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Put the kettle on and mind the step, because I'm not telling this twice. Forty years I cooked aboard the Marguerite Lowe, a collier out of Blyth, and her galley was no bigger than a wardrobe. One stove, one tin of dried peas, and a hook on the bulkhead where Tobias Renn hung his bass fiddle between watches. Tobias was all low notes and slow hands. He could make a pot of mutton sound like a hymn.

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Then the lad came aboard at Tyne dock, seventeen and thin as a broom handle, with a voice that climbed like a gull. Nobody asked where he'd come from. He sang the top line while Tobias walked the bottom, and by the second week the crew were tapping their mugs to it. I didn't like the sound at first. It was too much of two things wanting different places.

Off Flamborough the wind came round hard and the stove went out. The pot slid, the lamp swung, and the lad was sick over the rail and came back grey and shaking. Tobias didn't stop. He dropped into the old reel, low and steady, and waited. The boy's voice wobbled, then found the bottom note Tobias had been holding for him, and the two of them climbed together until the ship stopped groaning and started to sound like a ship again.

We made Blyth on the Friday. The lad went ashore to a band in Newcastle that paid in actual coin, and I never saw him again. But Tobias kept the galley wall, and on the morning we sailed for the last time he chalked two curls on the plaster, one above the other, touching at the middle like they'd only just stopped singing. Sing it wrong, he said, and you still have to sing it together.