Black and white flash design of a treble clef, music notes and swirling vine linework, shown without a body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Treble clef and music notes design

Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a treble clef at the upper left, with several solid note heads, stems and beams arranged down a curving stem. Thin and thick swirling lines, scrolls and a small leafy sprig at the top frame the motif in a tall, vertical composition. The design is rendered only in solid black ink on a white background, with no greys or colour.

Treble clef Music note Music Swirl Vine Scroll Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The piano slid another inch across the narrowboat's planks and Dora Pell put her shoulder to it, cursing the lock-keeper at the top lock who had sworn the cut was level. Her father's upright had ridden from Stourport under a tarpaulin, and every bridge hole since had tried to shake its notes loose. Behind her the Mary Ellen rocked on the grey water, and the willows along the towpath dragged their fingers across the roof.

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She had promised the church in Bewdley a working instrument by Saturday. The hammers had gone soft in the damp, so she spent the evenings under a paraffin lamp, wedging felt and checking the wires one by one while a moorhen clucked somewhere in the reeds. Her father used to say a piano was a staircase of pitches that climbed and then curled back on itself, and that you could see the shape of it in the scroll of the case if you looked long enough. She didn't believe him until the middle C rang true.

On Friday a boy from the lock cottage came down to the bank with a fishing rod and asked whether the box could sing. She played him a scale, then a hymn, badly, then the lopsided tune her father had written for the barge's first launch. The boy whistled it back a bar behind. Dora laughed and realised she had got the tune wrong herself, one quaver falling where a crotchet should have been, and that her father had left it that way on purpose.

On Saturday the piano went up the church steps on two planks and four men who complained the whole way. She sat down at it while the congregation filed in, and the first chord rolled out over the churchyard, low and a little out of time, like a heron lifting off the water. Nobody minded. Her father would have said the notes had found their own way down the stave, and so had she.