Black treble clef tattoo with swirling flourishes sitting on the inner wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Treble clef with flourishes on the wrist

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black treble clef sits at the centre of the frame, with fine curling flourishes and leaf-like strokes rising around it and a small swirl at its base. The linework is smooth and the ink is solid black with no shading or colour. The tattoo is centred on a pale wrist, shot straight on against a plain background.

Forearm Treble clef Music Flourish Swirl Wrist

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody aboard the Corisande could read a note, so the clef above the galley range stayed up for eleven months as a joke. I drew it there myself with a burnt stick from the grate, copying the one on the hymn board at Falmouth, and the flourishes came out like spray off a bow. Cook cuffed me for it. Then he started humming it.

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Our fiddler, Tobias Wren, had lost two fingers to a winch in the Bay and could no longer hold a bow. He sat on the coal sacks each night with the instrument across his knees and ran his thumb along the strings out of habit, and the galley boy, Dinny, began copying the clef onto flour sacks, the swirl at the base getting bigger each time, as if the thing wanted more room to turn.

In March we caught a gale off the Lizard that split the mainsail and laid the ship over for the length of a long prayer. Afterwards I found the stove cold, flour dusted over every surface, and the clef drawn huge across the bulkhead in soot. Tobias was standing beneath it, not playing, just moving his ruined hand through the air in the shape of the curls, counting under his breath. Nobody had taught him a time signature. He said the sea had one.

We limped into Bristol on a jury mast with a crew that hummed at the capstan. The clef was still on the bulkhead when the yard broke her up. I keep one of Dinny's flour sacks folded in my oilskin, and when the kettle starts to sing I hear the tail of that swirl drop, slow and certain, like a note held a long time before it is let go.