Traditional style colour tattoo of a black treble clef surrounded by red, orange and yellow flames with black outlines, on a forearm.

Treble clef in flames on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A black treble clef sits at the centre of a stylised flame design, with a yellow glow behind it. The flames are shaded in red and orange with grey shading along their edges and bold black outlines. The tattoo fills the centre of the frame against a plain pale background.

Traditional Forearm Treble clef Music Flame Fire

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The boiler under Marrowby Cottage Hospital had been coughing since Tuesday, and by three in the morning Nell Garside could smell it coming up the stairwell. She went down with a torch and found the stoker, a boy called Tobias Renn who was nineteen and hadn't slept, sitting on an upturned coal scuttle with his head in his hands.

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He said the gauge read true but the flame looked wrong. Yellow at the heart, he said, and it kept leaning toward the firedoor as if something on the other side were calling it. Nell had worked nights for twenty-six years and knew a fire that won't settle is listening to something. She asked him what he'd been singing. He went red and said nothing. She asked what old Amos Quill used to sing, the stoker who went north in the winter, and Tobias admitted it was a hymn tune with the wrong words, something about a boat and a lamp.

On the firedoor, under the soot, was a clef cut from sheet iron, black and bent at the tail, that Amos had hammered there himself. Nell rubbed it with her sleeve. Tobias started humming, badly, and then not badly, and the flame drew back from the door and sat down in the grate like a dog that has been told its name.

By dawn the wards were warm and the porters were complaining about the smell of toast. Tobias was still humming when the day shift came in, and Nell told him to keep on, because the boiler had never once been fixed by a man who stopped singing.