Black ink butterflies rise up the spine and a musical staff with notes sits low on the back of a woman in a red dress, in a garden setting.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Butterflies and music notes across a back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman seen from behind wears a red satin dress with a halter ribbon, with her long hair falling over one shoulder. Black butterflies in solid ink climb diagonally up the spine, with a few smaller ones near the shoulder blades. Below them, a musical staff with notes and a treble clef is drawn in black linework and shading against the pale skin, set among green foliage.

Back Butterfly Music note Musical staff Treble clef Spine

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lamp is near out, and I will tell you about the fiddler Tomas Vrana who walked the Kalda pass in the month the frost came early. He carried a case with no fiddle inside it, only a folded map and a stick of rosin wrapped in a customs slip. At the border hut the guard asked what he was smuggling. Tomas said nothing but music, and opened the case to show him the empty velvet.

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The guard laughed and waved him on, because a man who admits to nothing is not worth the stamp. Higher up, where the stones turn the colour of old bread, the butterflies found him. They came off the scree in dark clusters, wings like cut paper, and they settled on his coat in the shape of a staff. Every time one landed, a note rang somewhere inside the rocks, thin and sweet, as if someone on the far side had tuned an instrument and was waiting.

By dusk he had reached the last cairn. The notes had become a melody he half knew, the tune his mother hummed over the washing line in the valley he had left. He opened his mouth to sing it, and the butterflies rose all together, lifted the case from his hands, and carried it over the ridge into the other country. Tomas followed them down the far side with nothing in his arms but the sound.

They say the guard still finds rosin dust on the velvet lining in spring. Mind the pass when you go. Some of what we carry is only waiting to be let across.