Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Treble clef tattoo on the inner wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small solid black treble clef sits on the inner wrist, drawn with clean, even linework and little or no shading. The ink is pure black with no colour, and the clef is centred on the forearm. The background is a soft blur of green grass, with a dark wristband on the other arm and an orange and white patterned fabric at the lower edge.

Fine line Forearm Treble clef Music Musical notation

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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

Right, sit down, you at the back, and mind the sawdust on the boards. I'll tell you about the Palais on the front the winter the upright went flat, because that's where the little curl on people's wrists came from.

Keep reading

Old Mr Ashdown tuned that piano every Thursday for forty years, and he never once let anyone touch the lid. One night a girl called Nell Corrigan came in off the rain with a borrowed cornet and a coat full of sheet music. The drummer had gone off to Margate with the takings, so she sat down at the keys and played the waltz in the wrong key, very deliberately, until the dancers stopped and stared.

Ashdown didn't scold her. He pulled up a stool, lifted the lid, and showed her the brass hook of the bass wire wound round the treble like a shepherd's crook. "Every line on that staff is a promise to somebody's ear," he said. "The clef tells you where you are standing."

She learned to read it that winter. By spring she was leading the Thursday band, and the old man sat quiet in his chair by the door, tapping his foot. When they buried him she drew a treble clef on the back of his programme and passed it round the hall, and everyone agreed it looked like him, bent and patient, holding the whole tune up.