Black and red treble clef tattoo with paint-like splatter on the back of a hand, with a music staff and notes on the wrist above.

Treble clef with red splash on hand

Hand · Mixed · Photo

A black treble clef with a red stroke running through its centre sits on the back of a hand, with black and red splatter spreading across the skin. Bold black linework and soft grey shading form the clef, while the red adds a loose, painterly accent. Above it, musical staff lines with notes extend up towards the wrist.

Hand Forearm Treble clef Music staff Musical note Splatter Ink splash Music

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Her father took the fiddle down from its nail the morning the ice went out of the cut, and he played it once on the deck of the Mallow while the lock-keeper's dog barked at the water. Nobody on the towpath had heard him play since the winter his wife was buried at Hadley. The bargemen came out of their cabins and stood with their caps in their hands, and the girl sat on the coal hatch with her knees up and counted the bridges.

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The tune had a crooked spine to it, a long swoop that curled back on itself at the bottom like a hook the river had dragged through the reeds. Old Sim Tanner, who had poled the Mallow before any of them, said it was the song the lightermen used to sing before the bridges went up and cut the old river in two. He said the red line through the middle was the place where a rope gets cut loose. Nobody argued, because the fiddle's red-varnished neck had split along that same grain every spring for as long as anyone could remember.

Her father sold the fiddle at Brentford that autumn to pay the coal man. The girl went to the lock every evening after that and sat on the gate with her feet over the black water, humming the hooked part under her breath. The mud on the far bank threw back splashes of rust-coloured light where the sun caught it, and the staff of the tune lay out across the surface in ripples, five lines and a scatter of dots where the bargemen's wives had hung their washing.

In March a boy came up from the basin with the fiddle slung over his back, asking for the Mallow's girl. He could not play it. He only wanted her to tell him where the notes went. She showed him the splash of the lock gate, the dots on the water, and the one bend where the tune turned back on itself, and he laughed and set it down on the coping stone, where the river took it in one long, patient breath.