Black ink tattoo on an upper arm showing a treble clef and musical notes inside a ring of piano keys, with script lettering that reads music is what life sounds like.

Treble clef and piano keys on upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large treble clef sits at the centre of a circle of piano keys, with small musical notes placed around it. Script lettering above and below the circle reads music is what life sounds like. The linework is clean and the shading is in black and grey, and the design fills most of the upper arm.

Lettering Upper arm Treble clef Musical note Script text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Harbour Street piano had spent three winters under a tarpaulin, and when I lifted the lid the hammers looked like a row of tired old men waiting to be called in. Mrs Pell stood in the doorway of the boarding house with her arms folded. 'The A above middle C,' she said. 'Everything else can wait.'

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So I started with the fork. I struck it on my knee, pressed the stem to the wood, and listened to the room go quiet except for the gulls and the tide pulling at the slipway. Two of the keys stuck like wet matches. A third had lost its ivory and gone the colour of weak tea. I wedged the felt, turned the pins a hair at a time, and tried not to hurry, because a piano does not care how late the boats are.

Her husband, Tom, had played this instrument every Friday for thirty years, she told me, until the fleet stopped coming home in the same numbers and the pub stopped paying for a player. She had sold his boat to keep the lights on. She had kept the piano. Under the lid, in pencil, someone had written a line in careful capitals, and when I finally got the A to sit true against the fork she read it aloud for me, the way you read a sign to a stranger.

'Music is what life sounds like,' she said. 'He always said I was the flat note.'

I played the chord she asked for, C and E and G, and the room rang like a bell that had remembered its name. Out on the water a single light came round the breakwater, and she went to the window to count the boats.