Black and grey tattoo of a treble clef with the script words "I hope you dance" beside it, shown on skin in a lettering-led style.

Treble clef with "I hope you dance" script

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A large black treble clef with a solid bulb at its base sits on the skin, with the handwritten words "I hope you dance" running vertically beside its upper curl. The clef has bold, smooth outlines and soft grey shading, and the script is a thinner, slanted line. The photograph is black and white, with the tattoo centred against a plain light background and a fabric edge at the left.

Lettering Other Treble clef Music Script Lyric

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The staves had gone soft at the edges by the time Mrs Pryce handed me the hymnal, its spine held together with butcher's string. Rain came through the ballroom roof in three places, and the piano had been silent since the east tower fell in the winter my father left. Nobody in Hexcombe believed the gallery could still be played, so I was the only one who climbed the spiral stair that October with a pencil behind my ear and a notebook full of wrong guesses.

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The clef was the first thing I drew in the margin, a tall looping shape that Mr Tully said looked nothing like a clef at all. He was the estate's last joiner, a man who measured everything twice and trusted nothing he hadn't measured. I told him a clef was only a letter G dressed up for church. He laughed, then stopped at the heavy bulb at the bottom of the drawing and went quiet, the way men do when they remember a handwriting they used to know.

We rebuilt the action over one winter, wedge by wedge, with ivory keys scraped out of a drawer in the chapel. On the last night the damp finally lifted from the wires, and Tully read the words I had written beneath the clef, leaning slightly the way my hand always does when I am hurrying: I hope you dance. He said nothing. He pressed the lowest key with one finger and let the note fall away into the ivy, then asked who would be left to dance to it. I told him the castle had waited four hundred years for someone to ask that, and we went down the stairs in the dark, leaving the lid open.