Black ink drawing of a treble clef with its lower curl filled by piano keys, shown as a tattoo design on cream paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Treble clef made of piano keys

Black and grey · Flash

A treble clef is drawn in black ink, with its lower curve filled by a series of piano keys, and small dots and curls at the top and bottom. The linework is clean and even, with solid black keys and white keys left as open outlines. The design sits centred on a plain cream background with no shading or colour.

Treble clef Music Swirl Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm had kept the organ at Saint Oswin's for thirty-one winters, and in all that time the bellows boy never once saw him smile at the instrument. The pipes had gone green at their mouths and wheezed in the cold, but the keyboard was the thing he loved most, a row of ivory and ebony that the first builder had carved from tusks a merchant gave the abbey in settlement of a debt.

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When the abbot ordered the great west window reglazed, the masons pulled out the old lead and found, in a hollow beneath the sill, a tin box holding a curl of parchment. On it was a treble clef, its lower loop filled with the keys of a keyboard, each one drawn in its own careful line. Beneath it someone had written in faded ink: 'Play the curl and the hall will answer.'

Anselm carried the parchment to his cell and studied it for three nights without sleeping. On the fourth he climbed to the loft, set his fingers on the keys in the order the drawing showed, and began at the lowest curl. The pipes groaned, then sang, and from somewhere beneath the flagstones came a bell that no one had rung since the flood.

The bellows boy swore afterwards that the abbot came up the stairs with his hands over his ears, and that when he reached the top he took them away and wept. Anselm did not look round. He kept playing until the bell had answered every note, and then he closed the lid and went down to supper as if nothing had happened.