Ornate treble clef tattoo with musical notes and scrollwork on the outer arm, shaded in black and grey with touches of red.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Treble clef with musical notes on an arm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A large treble clef formed from ornate scrollwork, with musical notes drawn in black linework rising from its upper curl. The clef is shaded in grey with bold dark outlines, and some red tones appear in the swirls and along the upper edge. The tattoo fills the centre of the frame against a dark background, with the warm light making the skin look orange.

Neo-trad Forearm Treble clef Music note Scrollwork Swirl Music

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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

Sit down, sit down, you'll miss the 4.10 if you stand there gawping at the board. Aye, the one that's never on time. I'll tell you about the clef, since you've got the look of someone who'd like a thing to listen to while the rain does its worst.

Keep reading

There was a porter called Eddie Rourke at Carlisle, back when the trains still had steam in them and the signal box smelled of paraffin and tea. Eddie could not carry a tune in a bucket. But every morning he whistled the same three notes down the platform, high and then low and then high again, and the pigeons on the canopy would lift off and wheel round to answer him. The stationmaster said it was a disgrace. The drivers said it was the only thing that got them out of bed at five.

One February the wire that carries the timetable bells snapped in a gale, and the whole line went quiet. No bells, no bells at the level crossing, nothing. Eddie climbed the signal gantry in his good coat with a fistful of notes he'd cut from the back of a hymn book, and he pinned them to the cables, one after another, rising up the wire like a staircase. When the wind caught them they chattered like a clockwork orchestra. The signalman swore he heard the first train out of Carlisle that morning before it had even left Preston.

Right, that's the end of it, though you'll want to know what became of Eddie. He kept climbing that gantry for thirty years and never once fell, and when they pulled the old station down they found his iron lamp bracket curled round at the top like a treble clef. Folk still say the wind bent it that way. I've never believed a word of that.