Watercolour-style tattoo of a black treble clef merged with an anchor, with purple, blue and pink washes, on the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Treble clef and anchor on a thigh

Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A black treble clef forms the upper part of an anchor, with bold, brushed black linework and a few dots and small triangles around it. Purple, blue and pink watercolour-style washes spread behind the lower half, and a touch of orange sits across the anchor's crossbar. The tattoo is centred on the outer thigh, with denim shorts and a hand visible at the edge of the frame.

Thigh Treble clef Anchor Music Watercolour Splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Hal, The reunion invitation came to my mum's house, which forwarded it in a padded envelope with three stamps and a note telling me to stop being a hermit. So here I am writing instead of ringing, because you always said I couldn't hold a conversation on the phone without losing the thread, and I'd rather not lose it twice.

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You will remember the anchor I drew on the back of my music book in Year Ten. Mr Pryce said it was a sailor's doodle and not a fugue, and sent me out to the corridor. I have thought about it ever since. I kept insisting that a note could hold a boat if you bent it the right way, and nobody believed me except you. Last month I finally went down to the slipway at Mevagissey with a borrowed tuning fork and a sack of old sheet music that belonged to my grandad.

Here is the thing I never told anyone. The cable hut above the cove still has an upright piano in it, and nobody has tuned it since before the war. I spent four Saturdays on it with a borrowed hammer. On the last one, a crabber came round the point with its radio on, playing the same wrong hymn over and over. I struck the A to match it, and the whole hut hummed back at me. The water below turned violet where the sun caught it, then blue, then pink at the very edges, like the washes I used to bleed across my sketches.

So I'm not coming to the reunion. Tell Mr Pryce I found the fugue after all. Tell the others the boat is still out there, and the note still holds. Yours, Tom