Black and grey tattoo of an ornate treble clef with floating music notes and scrolling swirls on a lower limb.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Treble clef with music notes

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A large treble clef with ornate acanthus-style scrollwork forms the main subject, with a cluster of shaded musical notes rising along a set of staff lines on the left. The linework is bold and clean, with grey shading giving the scrolls and notes depth. The design fills the frame against smooth skin and a dark background.

Other Treble clef Music note Staff lines Scrollwork Swirl Music

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The piano at Carlow Street station has stood under the clock since before the refurbishment, and most people walk past it the way they walk past the timetable boards. I work in lost property, two doors along, and I hear it through the wall whenever the trains pause between arrivals. On Thursdays it is Mr Okafor, a retired signalman with a folder of hymn sheets he has never once opened.

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He plays by ear. His left hand climbs the same low figure every time, and his right hand picks out something that sounds like rain on a tin roof. Last month he played for forty minutes without stopping, and a girl with a rucksack sat down on the bench beside him and cried quietly into her sleeve. Nobody asked her why. I didn't either.

This Thursday the lid was up and the stool was empty. The folder lay on the music stand, and tucked inside its front cover was a sheet of tracing paper with a treble clef drawn over and over, each curl tighter than the last, the lowest loop shaded in soft pencil like the ironwork on the old canopy. Beneath it, in careful capitals, someone had written: THE B FLAT IS FOR THE PLATFORM.

I rang the number pinned to the staff board and got a daughter in Leeds who said her father had gone into hospital on Tuesday and had asked twice whether the piano was still in tune. So on Friday I sat down at ten past seven, with the 7.42 rattling in and the concourse thinning out, and played the only thing I can, which is scales, badly. When I reached the B flat the bench creaked, and a man in a rail jacket paused at my shoulder and said, "Again, love." I did.