Pencil sketch of a tattoo design: a treble clef formed from twining stems with bell flowers, a calla lily and small blossoms.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Treble clef entwined with flowers

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a treble clef whose stems curl through the body of the symbol and sprout bell-shaped flowers, a calla lily and a cluster of small five-petalled blossoms. The lines are light and sketchy, with some soft shading along the stems and petals. The drawing is in greyscale on a plain pale background, with the motif filling a tall, central composition.

Botanical Fine line Treble clef Music Flower Blossom Vine Stem Leaves

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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

Sit down, the lot of you, and mind the lift, it has opinions. This is about Dorothy Abbs, who lived on the ninth floor of Hollins House when the lift still worked and the piano still had all its teeth. She could not read a note of music, mind, but she could hear a wrong one from three landings down.

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Every Thursday she carried a tin of bulbs up the back stairs, lilies and bluebells and the little white blossoms that come up in the cracks, and she planted them in an old tyre on the balcony. The council man said she was not allowed. Dorothy said she had never once been allowed anything and it had not stopped the bluebells. By June the stems had climbed the railings and wound round them until they made a great looping shape, tall as a man, with a curl at the bottom like a sleeping dog and a loop at the top like a question mark that had decided to become a song.

The boy from flat fourteen, Terrence, said it was a sign for a clef, and Dorothy laughed so hard she had to sit down on the step. She never told him why she grew it that way. Only that the stairwell had been full of other people's music for forty years, and she wanted something of her own up there, something that stayed put and never needed tuning.

Terrence drew the shape in his exercise book when they moved her out in autumn. The lilies were still in the tyre, leaning over the edge toward the car park, and nobody had the heart to pull them up.