Black flash design of a treble clef merged with a fountain pen nib, with the words THIS IS MY STORY THIS IS MY SONG set in lettering beside it.

Treble clef and pen nib with lyric text

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A treble clef flows into the tip of a fountain pen nib, with a small dot at the nib's breather hole. To the right, the words THIS IS MY STORY THIS IS MY SONG are stacked in a mix of light and bold sans serif capitals. The linework is solid black with a distressed, worn texture on the clef and nib, shown against a plain white background.

Lettering Treble clef Music Lettering Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ask the millers of Caddon Vale why King Edric never heard his own praises sung, and they will blame the nib, not the singer. The bard Corran Aske owned a silver pen older than the throne, cast from a bell that once called the river back from flood. Every verse he wrote with it came out as a tune, so the court said, and the tune stayed in the ear of whoever heard it until they hummed it in their sleep.

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The king wanted a ballad for his daughter's wedding. Corran sat three nights in the north tower, the ink thickening in the cold, and wrote nothing he could bear to hear. On the third night a laundry girl named Wren came up the stairs with a basket of sheets and asked what he was so afraid of. He told her a song is only true if it has been lived in, and he had lived in nothing but this tower.

Wren laughed and said the river did not need anyone's permission to sing. So Corran walked down to the water with the pen and wrote what he saw: a ferryman's debts, a dog that waited at the wrong gate, the king's own cold hands on the reins. At the wedding the hall fell silent through the first verse, because every guest heard their worst day in it and could not look away.

Edric had Corran's tongue locked in the cellar for a week. Then he sent for the ballad again, and it was sung without a single lie in it. Corran kept the pen in his coat after that, and when children asked Wren why the bard never wrote a sad song, she only said the nib had always known which stories were worth the ink.