Black ink line drawing of a treble clef whose curls spell out the words whisper, words, of, wisdom, let it be, a lettering design shown on beige paper with no body placement visible.

Treble clef with looping script lettering

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink drawing of a treble clef, with its tail ending in a solid filled note head at the bottom. The words whisper, words of wisdom, let it be are written in flowing script that follows the curves and stem of the clef. The design is drawn in black on a plain cream background with no shading or colour.

Lettering Treble clef Music Script Quote Music note

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you with the cracked nose, and stop picking at that goat-gut string. Yes, you. The lyre does not care how hard you pull. I watched my own master, old Teleas of Kos, break three strings in a single winter because he could not bear a note that wandered. He thought a clean note was a note bullied into shape. The harbour women used to cover their ears when he tuned.

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Then came the autumn the north wind dropped on Kos and the fishing boats stayed hauled up for forty days. Teleas sat in the workshop with one gut string stretched over a cedar box, and he did not touch it. He sat so long the swallows nested in the rafters above him. One morning I heard the string sounding by itself, a low hum like someone breathing through a closed door. He had let it settle, that was all. He had stopped asking it for anything.

When the wind turned he played at the burial of Aristo the fisherman, and not one mourner could say afterwards what the tune had been. They remembered only the quiet between the notes, and how that quiet held them up. Teleas laughed at this. He said he had spent sixty years learning to speak, and the whole trick was to shut his mouth at the right moment.

So when you tune tonight, do not chase the pitch. Lay your ear to the wood, let the wood tell you where it wants to sit, and then say nothing at all. Leave the wisdom in the gap. That is where the old men kept it, and that is where I have kept mine.