Black ink line drawing of a treble clef filled with patterned bands, dotted swirls and flowers, a design that could suit a fine line or dotwork tattoo.

Treble clef with floral swirls

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A treble clef fills the centre of the drawing, surrounded by clusters of flowers, curling dotted swirls and rows of wavy parallel lines. The inside of the clef and the small circle at its base are filled with dots, rings, scallops and hatched patterns. The drawing is in black pen on a pale background with no colour.

Dotwork Botanical Treble clef Music Flower Swirl Dot

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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

At the house of Saint Oswin, high above the wet moor, the brothers sang eight times a day, and the old precentor, Sister Hild, could not read a note without squinting. So when the new novice, a boy called Piers who had come up from the valley with ink under his nails, was set to copy the great book of chants, she watched him closely. Piers drew the clef first, the tall curl of it, and then he could not stop.

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He filled the loops with fine rows, like the ridges of ploughed land, and gave each ridge a scatter of dots so the singers would know where to breathe. Around the clef he set flowers with five petals each, and curling tails of dots that spun out into the margins like smoke. Hild came with a candle and grumbled that a clef was a plain thing meant to tell a voice where to go, not a garden for bees.

Piers said nothing. That night a storm came off the moor, and the lamp in the scriptorium guttered out. In the dark the boy heard the choir rising through the stone wall, ragged and lost in the wind, and he pictured the lines he had drawn. He took his pen and dotted the small round base of the clef with the seven steps of the scale, then went to bed without a word.

At matins the next morning the brothers opened the book and sang the chant as written, and the voices found each other the way water finds a channel. Hild stood a long time with her hand on the lectern. Then she licked her thumb, turned to the margin, and found one more flower there, small and crooked, which Piers had drawn while the others slept. She left it where it was.