Black ink drawing of a treble clef curling into a heart outline, with two dots to the right, shown as a tattoo design on a plain white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Treble clef heart design

Black and grey · Flash

A bold black brush-style line drawing of a treble clef whose curls form the outline of a heart. Two small solid dots sit to the right of the heart. The linework is thick and uneven with no shading, and the image is set on a plain white background with no colour.

Treble clef Heart Music Musical note

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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

Mrs Abernethy had brought the score back twice already, each time tapping the same bar with a fingernail the colour of weak tea. "Your clef's gone lopsided, Mr Pardoe," she said. "Look at it. Like a fiddler's elbow."

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Pardoe did look. The treble sign on page four had swollen where the nib caught, its top curl sagging into a shape he had not intended. He had copied parts for the Brass Band since the war, and his hand was a good one, but lately it kept drifting towards a kind of loveliness that had no business on a band sheet.

He took the sheet to the window and held it against the grey light off Briggate. Two ink dots sat to the right of the bowl where he had rested the pen, fat as sultanas. Her husband had died in March, and she had sat through the last rehearsal with her hands folded over the cornet case he had left in the hall. She had not asked for anything since. She only ever asked about the clef.

He reached for his penknife to scrape the blot, then stopped. The heart was there in the curl, plain as a valentine, and he found he did not want it gone. He copied the whole page again, slowly, keeping the heart, and when he sealed the envelope he wrote on the back in small capitals: THIS ONE IS MEANT.