Black ink tattoo of a treble clef and bass clef on the upper back, with staff lines curling into a heart and script reading music is the sound of life.

Treble and bass clefs with script on upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink tattoo of a treble clef and a bass clef with two dots sits on the upper back. Five staff lines curl into a heart shape, and the words music is the sound of life follow the curve in script. The linework is clean and the clefs are solid black with some soft shading, and the design is centred on the back.

Lettering Back Treble clef Bass clef Music staff Heart Script Quote Music

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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

Sit closer, the stove has a temper but it keeps the draught off. You want the story of the night Pavel Dostál carried a double bass across the frontier at Lesna Gate in a crate he had painted white. The guard lifted the lid, saw the instrument lying in its own dark, and asked what a man wanted with a dead thing in January.

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Pavel did not answer with words. He drew his bow across the lowest string, and the sound came up out of the wood like breath from a sleeping animal. The guard's torch wavered. Behind him, two others stopped stamping their boots. Pavel had learned long ago that a border is only a line drawn on paper, and a sound carries no paperwork at all. He played the slow thing his mother hummed while she kneaded bread, the one where the bass line falls and then climbs back up on the fourth beat.

The senior officer, a thin man with a moustache like a wet brush, said nothing for a long time. Then he took a pencil from behind his ear and copied the first bars onto the back of the crossing slip in careful capitals, the way a schoolchild copies a sum. He stamped the slip and pushed it back across the counter. Pavel never learned whether the man could read music or simply liked the shape of the notes. He only knew the officer was humming under his breath all the way to the barrier.

So when people ask me what the lines on that crate are for, I tell them they are a road. Music is the sound of life, my mother used to say, and on that cold morning the sound of it got two men and one bass across a line nobody else could hear.