Fine line black tattoo of a treble clef and scattered music notes running from the nape of the neck down the upper back.

Treble clef and music notes down the upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A back and neck photographed in black and white, with a treble clef at the nape and a trail of small music notes, sharps and rests curving down the upper back and towards the right shoulder. The linework is thin and even, with the notes shown in solid black and no shading. The dark background and hair frame the tattoo, which sits centrally on the pale skin.

Fine line Back Neck Treble clef Music note Musical note

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bosun of the Marigold Lass did not want fiddlers aboard, but the owner's daughter had paid for passage, so Tobiah Crane came up the gangway at Falmouth with a fiddle under one arm and a bundle of tunes tied in oilskin under the other. The bosun eyed the bundle. Songs in the hold will spoil the rum, he said. Crane said songs keep better in the air than anywhere, and went below to find a hammock.

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Off the Azores the wind died and the ship sat rolling in a grey calm for nine days. Crane played each evening on the forecastle, and each evening the men heard the tunes change shape in the still air. A slow air came out of the fiddle like a thread and hung above the rail, and the sailors swore they could see small dark marks strung along it, catching the lamplight. On the ninth night the bosun untied the oilskin to check the sheets for damp and found them blank.

The notes had gone up the rigging, the old man said, and were waiting on the yard for the wind to ask for them. They drifted down the mast in a little trail, quick and sharp-tailed, settling on the stays and the ratlines and the bowsprit, turning slowly in the air. When a breeze finally came from the north-west the whole ship seemed to lean into it, and the crew said afterwards that the rigging hummed all the way to Lisbon.

Crane came back to Falmouth alone the following spring. The bosun, who had kept the blank sheets as a joke, met him at the gangway and asked where the rest of the tunes had gone. The old man only looked out at the grey water and said they were still out there, waiting for someone patient enough to fetch them. The bosun kept the empty oilskin in a drawer for the rest of his days, and on still nights he swore he could hear the rigging humming a tune he had never been taught.