Black ink tattoo of a treble clef and bass clef merged with curling staff lines and script wording, placed on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Treble and bass clef merged on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A treble clef and a bass clef are joined into one bold black symbol, with three small dots to the right and curved musical staff lines running beneath. Script wording curves around the design, reading as a phrase about sound and music. The tattoo is in solid black ink with some soft grey shading on the staff lines, and it is centred on the upper back against a lightly freckled skin surface.

Back Treble clef Bass clef Music staff Musical note Music

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gallopers had stopped turning by the time Mr Pryce found me under the organ, a tuning fork clamped between my teeth and my cheek pressed to the cold brass of a bass pipe. "Ten past seven," he said. "Rain's coming. You can hear it in the pipes." I could hear nothing but a flat E grumbling somewhere under the floorboards, which was the trouble.

Keep reading

My father taught me the organ the way other fathers teach fishing, with long silences and the occasional clip round the ear. The treble pipes carried the tune, bright and thin and quick to lie. The bass pipes did the lying down, holding the floor so the tune had something to stand on. "Neither one's any good alone," he said, tapping the score where the two clefs had been drawn one over the other, the high curl and the low dotted belly fused into a single sign. "Tune the lot or tune nothing."

Mr Pryce's fair folded for the last time at the end of that August. The organ went into a removals van bound for a salvage yard in Kent, and I went with it, though the yard had no use for a girl who could hear a sour fifth from the far end of a car park. I spent that winter with the pipes in pieces on a dust sheet, filing reeds until my fingers bled and then stopped bleeding.

In March I chalked the two clefs on the side of the van, joined as he had drawn them, and sat on the step with a flask until the light went. By morning the rain had rubbed them to grey smudges. I didn't mind. I knew the shape well enough to carry it in my head, and the bass note underneath it, which was still, in its stubborn way, in tune.