Small solid black tattoo of a treble clef with two dots and a sharp sign on the inner forearm near the wrist, against a plain wall.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Treble clef and sharp on the inner forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small, solid black tattoo of a treble clef sits on the inner forearm close to the wrist, with two dots beside its lower curl and a sharp sign near the top. The linework is bold and uniform with no shading, and the ink is a single dark tone. The arm is raised diagonally across a plain indoor background, with a person in a white top partly visible on the right.

Forearm Treble clef Bass clef Music Musical note

Find an artist for this

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

The spruce at the edge of Hollin Wood had been struck by lightning the summer before I was born, and my grandfather always said a fiddle cut from such timber would never tell a lie. I was fourteen when I finally went in with a hand saw and a sack. The bark had split along the trunk in a long black curl where the fire had licked it, and when I pressed my thumb into the grain, the wood hummed faintly, like a kettle a room away.

Keep reading

Mrs Abernethy at the mill wanted it for her son, who played for weddings and could never make the high notes sit still. She paid me in flour and two shillings and watched me shape the body with my grandfather's drawknife. At the scroll I cut a small hooked stroke, a sharp, the way the old hymn book marked a note that wants to climb, and beside the lower curl I burned two dots so the bass could find its own breath. She laughed and said I had drawn the wood a map.

The snow came early that year and buried the road to the mill. A boy from the village arrived at my door with a lantern and his cap in his hands, asking whether the fiddle was ready, because Mrs Abernethy had sent word that the bride would not wait. I wrapped the instrument in my coat and walked him back through the trees. When he drew the bow across the first string, the high note rose into the branches, and the snow slid off them in one long shining sheet, and we went home by the sound alone.

Mrs Abernethy keeps the fiddle on a nail above her stove now. She says the wood still remembers the storm, and that a good note is only a wound that has learned to sing. I kept the offcuts, and on nights when the frost is hard I hear them humming in the dark, very faintly, as if the forest were trying to finish the tune.