Black and grey treble clef tattoo with flowing script lettering woven through it, shown on the upper back.

Treble clef with script on upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A treble clef runs down the upper back, with its top curl and tail drawn in bold black linework. Soft grey shading fades along the curves, and two lines of script lettering sit beside and below the clef, forming part of the design. The image is a close crop centred on the tattoo, with the skin tone neutral and the ink clearly defined.

Lettering Back Treble clef Music Script Calligraphy Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mother Lusk kept the fiddle in a flour sack under the cart seat, because the penny men at the fair always wanted to take it off her. Tobiah sat on the shaft and watched the rain come across the common toward the dodgem tent, counting the lamps as they came on one by one.

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The fiddler, Aldous Crane, had lost his bow to a card game at Stroud, so he played with a hazel switch he cut fresh each morning. Every tune came out of the fiddle with a curl in its tail, like the end of a letter. He wrote the tunes in a ledger with the words set beside them, the way his grandfather had, so a song could be read as well as heard. The folk on the ground said the ledger held a spell. Tobiah thought it was only ink and patience.

When Mr Pell came to collect the take and found the cart empty, the fiddle was gone and the boy had the sack. Tobiah climbed onto the shaft and played the top line of the ledger, the tune with the swirl at its end. The rain stopped over the common for the length of one bar, and Pell's horses lifted their heads together. Pell counted his coins twice and let the boy keep the fiddle.

Years later Tobiah had a fair of his own. On the first night he sold a tune at the gate for a penny and wrote beneath it the only words he ever learned to spell properly. On cold nights, when the wheel stalled, the lads said you could still hear that tune turning round the bottom of the valley, looking for the gate it came in by.