Pen drawing of a treble clef and scattered musical notes arranged in a heart outline, a tattoo design sketch on lined paper with the words my tattoo written below.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Treble clef and music notes in a heart shape

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A hand-drawn pen sketch of a treble clef with musical notes and staff lines curving around it to form the outline of a heart. The linework is thin and even, with the notes drawn as simple filled and open heads with stems. The design sits on lined notebook paper, with the handwritten words my tattoo in the lower left corner.

Fine line Treble clef Music note Heart Staff lines

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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

The exercise book was the only thing my uncle left that the sea hadn't got to first, so I carried it onto the ferry in a freezer bag. Calum would have laughed at that. He kept his tobacco in biscuit tins and his fishing line in cereal boxes, and he never once trusted anything he couldn't wrap in newspaper. The wind on the top deck kept lifting the pages back to the start, so I held them down with my palm and read the same first page over and over until the mainland came up grey out of the spray.

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He had drawn the same shape on every page. A treble clef stood up the middle like a lighthouse, and the staff lines bent round it until they formed the top and sides of a heart. Notes dropped out of the curve in pencil and then in ink, quavers with their tails flicked, crotchets with open heads, a few small rests like sleeping birds. Where the lines met at the bottom, the clef's tail came down to a point. Underneath, in his square capitals, he had written the names of hymns sung at the kirk on the south shore, and the year each one was first played in the hall.

When I got home I went to the piano in the community hall, the one with the sticking E that the committee keeps promising to fix. I played his tunes from the notes alone, badly at first and then less badly, and I could hear him humming under them, flat and patient, the way he hummed over the engine when the boat was giving him trouble. The last page of the book had the heart with nothing inside its top curve. Only the lines, waiting.

So I wrote the final note myself, a crotchet with its stem running down into the clef's point, and I did it in pen, because that is how he taught me to commit to a thing. The ferry horn sounded across the bay as the ink dried, and the page went quiet under my hand.