Fine line black tattoo of a treble clef, music notes on swirling staff lines and small stars, on the side of a person's lower torso near the hip.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Treble clef and music notes on the side

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A fine line tattoo of a treble clef and musical notes on curved staff lines, with small star shapes scattered along the swirl. The linework is thin and crisp, with light grey shading in places and no colour ink. The design rises diagonally across the lower side of the torso, with the clef at the upper left and the notes sweeping down to the right.

Fine line Other Treble clef Music note Staff lines Star Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lamp's giving out and I'll not waste oil on the dark. You want the tale of Mabel Fairweather and the piano that wouldn't stop humming. Four hundred steps down from the Mercy Street bridge, in a cellar that smelt of wet coal and cheap gin, there was a tuner called Ezra Oakes who could hear a cracked note from across a ballroom. He was the last man in Leeds who still carried a pitch fork in his waistcoat pocket, worn bright as a sixpence.

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One February night Mabel came down those steps with a letter in one hand and a tin of brass polish in the other. The letter said her father had left her the old Broadwood upright, and the piano had started singing by itself. Not tunes, mind. Bits of tunes, rising up the keys like someone climbing a stair in the dark, then tumbling back down to the bottom and starting again. Ezra put his ear to the wood and listened a long while. Then he said, very quietly, that the instrument wasn't haunted, it was simply waiting for its last line to be finished.

They worked through the sleet for three nights. Ezra drew the stave lines on a scrap of paper, curling them round the cellar's rotten beam like a river finding its way, and Mabel pricked the notes in with a sewing needle, a star for every bar they'd gotten right. On the third night the piano played the whole melody through, clean and slow, and then the lamp went out and nobody could say who was laughing in the dark.

Mabel still has the drawing pinned above her kettle. Every time the wind gets under the bridge, she swears she hears the clef at the top of the page humming along.