Colour tattoo of two beamed musical notes on a forearm, with a purple and red note on the left and a teal and green note on the right, in a soft blurred style.

Two beamed music notes on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows two eighth notes joined by a sloping beam, with a round notehead on each stem. The left note is purple fading to red, and the right note and beam are teal fading to green, with soft, feathered edges and no hard outlines. The photo is taken straight on against a dark sleeve and a striped blanket, with the tattoo placed in the centre of the frame.

Forearm Music note Musical notation

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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

You hear the piano before you see the room. Mrs Abernethy keeps it under a lace runner in the front parlour of Seaview House, Hastings, and nobody has played it since the spring gales flooded the cellar. The lodgers call the damp the ghost. You call it a job, three guineas and a roll of tuning hammers, and you kneel on the carpet with a fork struck against your knee.

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The middle A rings true. The G above it wavers, flat as a wet sail, and you chase it down with the pin until the two notes sit together like sisters who have finally agreed on something. Through the bay window the sea turns from pewter to bruise to the green of the bottles the fishermen's boys sell on the front. A girl in a yellow mac keeps losing her kite to the shingle.

Mrs Abernethy brings tea on a tray with one cracked cup and asks whether you can read the sheet pinned above the keys. You can. Someone has drawn two quavers joined by a sloping beam, the left one shaded purple fading to red, as if pressed with a thumb, the right one inked teal fading to green. Underneath, in a careful hand: for Walter, who went out on the Tuesday.

You play them both, the low purple note and the high teal one, and the beam between them hangs in the room a moment longer than it should. Mrs Abernethy sets her cup down without a sound. You leave the sheet where it is and close the lid gently, the way you would close a door on someone sleeping.