Fine line black tattoo of a treble clef followed by musical notes arranged to read as love, placed on the upper back.

Treble clef and music notes on the back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A small black tattoo on pale skin shows a treble clef followed by stylised musical note shapes that together spell out a word resembling love. The linework is thin and even, with no shading, and the lettering runs in a gentle curve across the skin. The background is softly blurred, and the composition is centred on the tattoo.

Fine line Back Treble clef Music note Love Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The upright in the back room of the Gull and Fiddle had not been tuned since the Jubilee, and Ruth Okonedo knelt beside it with her hammer, two felt wedges and a flask of stewed tea, prepared to lose an afternoon. The lid was warped and the ivory on middle C had gone the colour of weak tea. When she lifted the fallboard she found a folded sheet tucked against the hammers, pencilled in a copyist's careful hand.

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It was a waltz, nothing more, in E flat. Someone had written a treble clef at the head of the stave and then a row of notes whose heads had been drawn like small letters: an o, another o, a sharp angular v, a colon of two dots, and a curl that might have been a c. Ruth read it twice before she understood it was a message, the sort men wrote in the years when the postmaster opened every envelope bound for the fishing cottages. Underneath, in ink: For E., when the tide is out.

She played the phrase. The note under the v rang sour, a whisper flat against its neighbours, and the sound reminded her of the harbour bell that had rung every evening since she was a girl. She turned the pin a fraction, then another, until the string sang true with it. Behind her a chair scraped. An old man in a flat cap stood in the doorway holding a pint he had clearly forgotten.

"Edwin wrote it that way," he said. "Couldn't read a bar of music to save his life. Only whistled. Used to say a note was just a letter with its hat on." Outside, the bell began its evening count, and the string answered it. Ruth turned the sheet over. On the back, in the same hand, a single line: I will be here at the bell.