Solid black treble clef tattoo on the upper back, with a swirl of small music notes and light blue and red dots.

Treble clef with music notes on upper back

Back · Mixed · Photo

A bold, solid black treble clef sits on the upper back, with its tail curving down toward the lower left. A loose swirl of small black music notes, outlined by light blue and red dots, arcs around the clef. The skin is light and the background is a black top, with the image framed close on the tattoo.

Back Treble clef Music note Music Swirl Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm kept the rule of silence, so he taught me the staff with his hands. Every morning in the scriptorium at Saint Ebba's, above the Wear, I ruled five lines in lead point and waited for him to tap the parchment where the clef should go. He would draw it in one unbroken stroke, a loop at the top, a round bowl swelling out of the middle, and a tail that dropped like a plumb line before curling back on itself. "Hold the pen as if it might run off," he said. "The sound must know where it lives."

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The notes were the difficult part. Anselm sang each one before I inked it, and the little black heads rose and fell like swallows over a field. The illuminator, Sister Margery from the nunnery across the water, ground her blues from lapis and her reds from vermilion, and she dotted them along the path of the melody so the choir could follow the curve with their eyes. She said a chant that could be seen was a chant that would not be lost when the old men died.

Anselm died in the Lent of my ninth year, with his hand still resting on the psalter. I finished the book alone. On the last leaf I drew the clef larger than the others, as he had taught me, and when I reached the tail I let it run off the page, down past the margin and into blank vellum where no line had been ruled. Margery came to check my work and found the stroke wandering. She said nothing. Then she took her finest brush and began dotting blue and red in a loose spiral, one note after another, until the edge of the page seemed to sing.