Small black fine line treble clef tattoo with two dots on the inner forearm near the wrist.

Treble clef on the inner wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small treble clef with two dots beside its lower curl is tattooed on the inner forearm, just above the wrist. The linework is thin and mostly solid black, with some shading along the curves of the clef. The ink is black on pale skin, and the photo is taken from above against a dark background, with the hand and a ring visible below the tattoo.

Fine line Forearm Treble clef Music Musical notation Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have the calliope key worked loose from its pin by the third week of the wet season, so every night you hum the tune under your breath instead. The Halloway Bros. Travelling Show has three tents left, one elephant who will not kneel, and a ringmaster who sells raffle tickets for a painted wagon with no wheels. Mr Pell says the autumn crowds will come back if the music does. He says it while counting the takings into a biscuit tin.

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The score is the only thing the show still owns outright. It lives in a green folder under the bed of the cook's van, its pages gone soft as cloth, every line written in the mauve ink of a dead bandmaster. The clef at the head of each stave looks like a question someone started and never finished, and the two dots beside its lower curl seem to be waiting for an answer. You learned to read it at nine, from the bandmaster himself, who rapped the page with a pencil whenever you looked up at the acrobats instead.

On the last night in the field by the canal, the rain stops for the first time in a month. You climb onto the empty bandstand with the folder under your arm, and the wind lifts the cover off the big drum. You play the tune without the pin, badly, one key sticking every time, and the lights in the caravans come on one by one. Nobody claps. Somebody in the cook's van starts whistling the same line, a half-beat behind you.

By morning the trucks are gone to the coast. The folder is buttoned inside your coat, the bandstand is a square of wet boards, and on the notice board at the depot someone has pinned a handbill stating plainly that the calliope is for sale. You hold the score up to the grey light until the dots show through, two small suns waiting for the rest of the bar to come home.