Fine line black tattoo of a wing rising from a treble clef style swirl on the side of the ribs, with light shading along the feathers.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Winged treble clef on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A small black tattoo sits on the side of the torso, showing a wing that sweeps upwards from a curled treble clef style swirl. The outlines are thin and even, and the feathers of the wing are partly filled with soft grey shading. The skin is lit evenly against a dark waistband at the top of the frame, with the tattoo centred in the lower half.

Fine line Ribs Wing Treble clef Swirl Music Feather

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ormerod carried her tuning fork and a tin of felt up eleven flights of Carrick House because the lift had been broken since March. On the ninth landing she stopped to get her breath and heard a tune coming down the stairwell. It was a slow thing, climbing and then falling away, like a bird that had forgotten how to keep its height.

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The tune came from flat twelve, where the Hallorans had lived until they moved to Dewsbury and left their upright piano behind, too heavy for the van. Nobody had lived there since. The door hung off one hinge and was propped with a brick. Inside, the piano sat with its lid down and a skin of dust on it. Mrs Ormerod lifted the lid. The hammers were still, but the tune went on, quiet, as if it came from inside the wall. She laid her palm on the wood and felt it buzz like a wasp in a jar.

She understood then that the tune had been waiting for someone to open the lid. It had been shut in with the damp for years, a clef curled tight as a snail, with a wing folded on its back and no sky to use it. She tuned the piano that afternoon, every string, the way her father had taught her. When she struck the last note, the window of flat twelve swung open by itself and the sound went out over the car park.

Pigeons lifted off the bins. By evening the whole block was humming the bar: the children on the bottom step, the man in seven who whistled through his teeth. The next morning a single grey feather lay on the sill of flat twelve, and the piano was quiet. Nobody on the ninth floor has heard the tune since, though Mrs Ormerod still climbs the stairs on Tuesdays, just in case.