Black and grey treble clef with curling music staves and notes tattooed across a stomach, with the word Music in script below.

Treble clef and music staves on a stomach

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A large treble clef sits at the centre of a ribbon of music staff, flanked by scrolling staves and small musical notes, with the word Music in script beneath. The linework is bold and the shading is soft grey, giving the clef and ribbon a sense of depth. The design is centred on the abdomen, with the navel sitting inside the top curl of the clef.

Other Treble clef Music staff Music note Script Music Ribbon

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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

You find the piano under a dust sheet on the morning the road closes, and Mrs Orme tells you it has not been opened since her husband died in the hard winter when the lamps failed. The lid sticks. Inside, the hammers are furred grey and one string has gone slack like a dropped thread, so you borrow her sewing needle and a pot of oil and set to work while the snow keeps falling past the taproom window.

Keep reading

Four guests are stranded with you: a drover with bruised fingers, a schoolmistress reading the same page twice, a surveyor who counts the panes, and a boy who keeps asking when the plough will come. Nobody asks you to play. You sketch staves on the back of a bill of fare and prop it on the mantel, and the clef you draw at the top of it curls over the lines like a fern unrolling in the heat of the fire.

On the third night the drover hums something under his breath, flat and wrong, and you realise it is the tune that is pencilled faintly on a sheet folded inside the lid. The notes stop mid-bar in a hand that was clearly someone's husband's. You lift the lid, find the key that sticks, and play the bar he never finished. The room goes so quiet you can hear the snow settling on the roof.

When the plough finally grinds up the lane, you leave the lid open. Frost still clings to the window where you traced the clef with your breath, and as the sun climbs it starts to melt from the top curl downward, one line at a time, as though somebody inside has begun to read it aloud.