Black tribal style line drawing of a cello with a bass clef body and a curled scroll, shown as a flash design with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal style cello design

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A bold black outline drawing of a cello, with its scroll at the top and a bass clef shape forming the upper body. An f-hole is drawn on the lower body, and the neck and endpin are rendered as tapering solid lines. The design uses solid black ink on a plain white background, with no greys or colour.

Blackwork Music Bass clef Scroll

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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

Gather in, gather in, and mind the puddle by the eel barrow, for the rain has been coming off the Cathedral roof since Tuesday and nobody's feet are dry. Now. You want the story of the cello that was sold for a loaf of bread and a promise? Then listen, because I shan't tell it twice in this weather.

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There was a stall at the far end of Wetherby Market, under a tarpaulin the colour of wet slate, where a man called Ansel Crewe sold everything nobody else wanted. Clocks without hands. Gloves with one finger missing. And, hung on two nails above the scales, a cello with a scroll curled like the tail of a sleeping cat. Its body had a bass clef for a waist, and a single f-hole on the lower bout where the wood had split and been mended with thread. Nobody ever bought it. Ansel said it was waiting for a player who had been rained on properly.

Then one grey morning a girl came in out of the downpour with a battered violin case she could not afford to carry any farther, and she asked what the cello cost. Ansel named a price no one could pay. She laughed and offered him her bread roll, still warm in its paper, and the half of a bus fare she had left. He looked at the bread a long time. Then he took the cello down and laid it across her arms the way you would pass a sleeping child.

She never played it in the market. She played it on the steps of the cold chapel, every Sunday through the winter, and the rain dripped off the endpin and ran down into the gutter, and people stopped with their shopping to hear the low note that sounded like someone clearing their throat before a confession.

So if you're wondering what the bread was worth, ask the cello. It has never told me, and I have asked it often.