Brown ink sketch of a tattoo design with a treble clef as the body, musical notes on the wings and curled swirls, shown on cream paper with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Winged treble clef design sketch

Colour · Flash

A hand-drawn sketch in brown ink shows an insect-like form with a treble clef running down the centre as its body. Musical notes sit across the wing lines, and curled swirls and small dots decorate the lower wings. The loose, sketchy linework is set on a plain cream background with no shading.

Treble clef Music note Wing Swirl Insect Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

I was carrying the tuning fork up the back stairs of the Co-op hall because my father's knees had finally given out that winter, and Mr Pryce wanted the upright ready by Saturday. The hall smelled of floor polish and wet coats. Someone had left the high windows open, and every few minutes a dragonfly blundered in off the allotments and bumped against the light fitting as if it had an appointment it could not find.

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I had been drawing them all week on the margins of the hymn sheets, the way other girls in Carrow Bridge drew hats. A treble clef for the body, curled at the foot where a tail should be, and wings stretched so wide they had to lie across the staves. Mrs Dunning caught me at it on Thursday and said I would ruin good paper. She was right, but she was also the only person who asked what I meant by it.

What I meant was this. The dragonflies came back to the river every August, and the men at the mill said they were only after the midges. My father said they had been listening to the weir longer than any of us had been alive, and the weir kept the same pitch as the bell at St Aidan's. I had checked it with the fork. It was true, so I pencilled it inside the cover of his tuning book where nobody would look.

On Saturday the piano came right on the last string, a clean A that hung in the empty hall. A dragonfly dropped from the rafters and settled on the lid, wings catching the light, and it sat there while Mr Pryce played three bars of a song his wife used to sing. Nobody moved. Then it lifted, found the open window and went down over the water toward the mill. That night I drew it again from memory, every wing note in its proper place.