Black ink treble clef with a splattered ink background on a forearm, in a blackwork style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Treble clef with ink splatter on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large treble clef sits in negative space against a dense black ink splash that drips down the arm. The clef is left as bare skin while the surrounding ink is solid black, with fine splatter lines and small triangle accents around the edges. The image is black and grey only, cropped close to the forearm against a plain, softly lit background.

Blackwork Forearm Treble clef Music Musical notation Ink splatter Splash Drip

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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 yourselves down, the lot of you, and mind the crisps on the step. This is about Mr Ferris on the ninth floor of Halberd House, and the black paint he poured down the stairwell the winter the council stopped sending men to fix the lights.

Keep reading

Ferris had been a piano tuner before his hands went, and he still heard the building in pitches. The lift hummed a flat B. The pipes behind the kitchen wall sang a sharp E whenever the boiler cycled. He said the whole block was a song nobody had ever written down, so he would write it himself, in ink, on the wall beside the bins where the rain ran off the roof.

He worked three nights with a tin of Indian ink, a stiff brush and a jam jar of water. Each night he splashed a little more, dark and wild, until the render looked like a thundercloud had burst against it. Then, with a bar of carbolic soap, he scraped out one tall shape in the middle, a treble clef, leaving the bare concrete to show through like a lamp in a fog. The kids from the fourth floor thought it was a ghost. Mrs Okafor thought it was vandalism. Nobody thought it was music until the Thursday the lift cable snapped and a girl from the flats started whistling the clef's own curl up the stairs, and every landing answered her.

Sit still now. Hear that? That's the ninth floor, humming its flat B. Ferris is up there somewhere, under the paint, keeping time.