Colour tattoo on a thigh of a treble clef formed from twisting brown vines, with two red birds perched on it and a small red rose.

Treble clef of vines with two red birds on a thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A treble clef is formed from twisting brown branches with thin tendrils and green leaves spreading outward. Two red birds perch on the upper curves, and a small red rose sits near the centre, with the bird and rose shaded in soft tones. The design runs vertically up the outer thigh against a plain skin tone, with a dark background behind the leg.

Botanical Realism Thigh Treble clef Vine Branch Bird Rose Leaf Music

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, and mind the fire, for the wind off the harbour is sharp tonight. Yes, you may have the honey cake. Now, the lyre-maker Thales had a workshop above the salt sheds at Miletus, and he could not abide a crooked string. He spent a whole summer hunting for wood that would sing, and he found it at last in a vine that had climbed a dead plane tree beyond the city walls.

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The vine had wound itself around the trunk so many times that the old wood rotted away inside, leaving a hollow spiral of living branch. Thales cut it free with his bronze saw, and when he turned it in the light he saw that it curled into the very shape the scribes use for the high notes, a loop at the top and a long tail sweeping down. He laughed out loud, then went quiet, because two crimson finches had been nesting in the crook of it and were watching him with their small black eyes. He could not bring himself to move them, so he carved the lyre around their perch and tucked a single rose bud near the centre of the curl, where the sap ran strongest.

The lyre took him three winters. When at last he strung it, the notes came out so clear that the finches lifted off and circled the workshop, singing back. A steward from the tyrant's house heard of it and offered a talent of silver. Thales told him the price was a hand's width of the wood for every song he had ever been paid to sing. The steward laughed and went away without it.

Thales played alone that night, and the vine did what vines do. Every spring after, a tendril crept under his door and up the leg of his stool, and every spring the rose opened a little wider. Ask the shepherds on the hill and they will tell you the two birds never left. They sing at first light, and if you listen closely you can hear the wood answer them.