Black and grey realism tattoo of a treble clef and curling music staff with notes on the inside of an ankle.

Treble clef and music staff on an ankle

Realism · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A large treble clef sits within a ribbon of five-line music staff that twists up the ankle, with several black musical notes scattered along the staff lines. The clef and notes are rendered in solid black ink, while the ribbon is shaded in soft greys to give it a three-dimensional, rolling appearance. The tattoo fills the frame against a plain skin tone, with a white and patterned cloth visible in the background.

Realism Ankle Treble clef Music staff Musical note Ribbon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wind took the first page off the drying line before Aunt Morag had finished pegging the second, and that was how the tune got out of the house and across the bay. My grandfather had copied it onto the back of a herring tally sheet the winter before he died, five ruled lines of it, with a treble clef drawn like a swan's neck that curled over at the foot. He never wrote a note down without humming it first, so the page was half music and half weather.

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I chased it along the shingle in my wellingtons, past the creels and the upturned dinghy, and found it caught on the rocks below the pier with three black notes still stuck to the staff like limpets. Calum from the ferry office came down to see what the commotion was. He could read notes better than anyone on the island, and he stood with the wet paper flapping in his fist and hummed the first bars, the quavers jumping the lines like stepping stones across a burn.

We tried it on the harmonium in the church hall that evening, but every time someone sang the words the notes slid off the staff and went wandering. Morag said that was the trouble with grief set to a reel, it would never sit still on a line. Calum laughed and said the tune was simply tired of being indoors.

So we nailed the page to the end of the pier post, where the sea spray could take it and the wind could tug it. Now, on still nights, the fishermen swear they can hear a fiddle out past the breakwater, playing a reel nobody on the island can quite finish. I have stopped trying to keep it on the page.