Black ink treble clef tattoo with ink splatter behind it on the inside of a forearm, in a blackwork style.

Treble clef in ink splatter on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large treble clef sits on the inner forearm, left as bare skin in negative space against a dense black ink splatter that spreads outwards and drips downwards. The linework is bold and smooth on the clef, while the splatter is loose and painterly with fine spray marks at the edges. The image is in black and grey on a light skin tone, with a blurred background of a jumper sleeve and a wooden floor.

Blackwork Forearm Treble clef Music Musical notation Ink splatter Splash

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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

The rain has found the gap under the awning of the Saturday market on Cathedral Street, and you have spent an hour moving stock away from the drips. Your trestle table holds hand-copied music: a hymn book nobody prints any more, a waltz for left hand alone, a cello part for a school orchestra in 1962. Mrs Okafor from the bric-a-brac stall next door says you look like a man who has lost a bet.

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The bottle goes over at half past eleven. It is the iron gall ink your father used to mix in the back kitchen, and it runs across the table in a black tongue and drops off the edge onto the wet cobbles. You grab the only thing within reach, a sheet of card you had laid over a fresh title page to keep the dust off. The ink hits everything else. It bursts across the paper in starbursts, fine spray at the edges, and it runs down the table legs in long drips that pool around your shoes. The treble clef you drew that morning sits untouched underneath the card, its curls still the clean white of bare paper.

Ruth Anand comes for her commission at four, under a borrowed umbrella. The score is the song her husband used to whistle while he fried eggs, and she has waited three weeks for it. You offer to redraw the page. She shakes her head and holds it up to the grey light, turning it slowly so the rain beads on the black and slides off without marking the clef.

"He'd have said it looked like the notes were climbing out of the dark," she says, and she folds the page into her bag without looking at you. You pack the stall in the dusk while the drips keep falling from the awning. The only thing the spill did not touch is the clef, and it stays bright in the black long after the market lights go out.