Fine line tattoo of a treble clef on five staff lines with a blue and pink watercolour wash, sitting across the inner wrist and forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Treble clef on staff lines across a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A treble clef is drawn in thin black fine line work on five horizontal staff lines that wrap across the inner wrist. A soft watercolour wash in blue fading to pink sits over the right-hand part of the staff lines, with a small splatter trailing downward. The image is a close, well-lit photo of the wrist against a plain pale wall, with the black linework sharp and the colour softly blended.

Fine line Forearm Treble clef Music staff Music Watercolour Splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom,

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The Mechanics' Hall piano came back from the tuner's last Tuesday with its lid propped open like a mouth that has said too much, and Mr Hebden asked me to play the Sunday hymn on it so he could hear the difference. I didn't tell him I'd spent three nights on that action with a feather and a pot of glue. I played "Abide With Me" and the top octave sang the way it did when Mother was alive, bright and a bit impatient.

Afterwards I walked down to the dye works on Calder Lane, where the vats were still cooling from the week's run. Someone had painted staff lines on the brick wall outside the drying shed, five of them, and drawn a treble clef at the left end in black paint. Under them the blue had run down from a spilled bucket, then the pink from the madder tub, and the two had bled into each other the way wet things do. I stood there longer than I should have, reading it like a score written by weather.

I'm writing because I think it was you. You always said the clef was the only sign worth knowing, that everything else is just a way of getting back to it. I've put the spare key under the pot where you used to hide your pipe, and I've kept your stool by the piano. Come home before the frost. The hall needs a proper tuner and I need someone to tell me when the blue has gone too far.

Ada