Pencil drawing of a treble clef with curling staff lines and small musical notes, shown as a tattoo design on a grey background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Treble clef with staff lines and notes

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil sketch of a large treble clef with five staff lines that loop through its curves, with small musical notes sitting on the staff. The linework is dark and fairly bold, with some shading on the clef's loops and a soft grey, uneven paper background. The composition is centred and vertical, with a dark vignette border around the image.

Treble clef Music staff Musical note Music

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Okafor's piano had been coming through the party wall of Flat 14 since March, and Dev had stopped minding by the third week. It was always the same piece, the left hand climbing while the right kept losing its place near the top of the page. He knew exactly where she went wrong because he could hear her stop, sigh, and start again from the beginning of the bar.

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On a Tuesday the lift was out again, so he took the stairs with the post. Eleven floors. On the landing of the ninth, someone had chalked five lines across the concrete, and a clef drawn in one long loop that ran down the stairwell wall. He never found out who did it. The clef's tail coiled round like a banister rail, and the staff lines bent with it, so the whole thing seemed to be winding him gently down toward the car park.

At Flat 14 he knocked, and she answered with the music still in one hand. She didn't ask him in. She said her grandson was coming on Sunday to play the bass part at the church hall, and she could read the treble well enough, but the clef always confused her where it curled round. Dev took the pencil from behind her ear and drew the lines through the loops, the way his father used to do on the backs of gas bills.

When he finished, the notes sat on the lines like birds on a wire. She held the sheet up to the window light. "Well," she said, and picked out the first bar with one finger, slowly, then the second. The wall stayed quiet after he went back down. On Sunday, when he carried the bins past the church hall, the music was already spilling out of the open door, and it did not stop at the top of the page.